Document File Formats

What is the best format to keep a given document in?

Source of document: paper

TIFF: this is a scanner output format and can be compressed

Some people are promoting the use of PDF's for document stoage.

What are the trade offs?

1. PDF is a doc format, TIFF is more of an image format. Programs to view PDF's are a little more user-friendly and widely available.
2. Both standards are pretty much open and universal.
3. Sizes?
4. Can I store both image and text data in a PDF? Dang, where's that PDF of the Acrobat PDF Bible?? Where are the specs for PDF format?

Source of document: digital

This is mostly dictated by the format of the source file, but I am inclined to think I should settle on a few standards and transcode everything into those formats.

audio: mp3 (yes I know it's a copyrighted format but it's ubiquitous) This will include voicemail if I ever go over to a whizzy Asterisk system here at home.

photo: jpeg or tiff - General rule: do not transcode TIFF to JPEG, which is lossy.

movie: I have so few movies right now that this is not relevant yet.

text files: I don't want to store formatted text files for long term access in MS-Word format! What format does OO use?

Plain text files should stay that way.

email: I think email should be stored into a MySQL database when it comes in and purged automatically after about a year unless I tag messages for archiving. This goes for both sent and received email. I might want to automatically tag/archive mail with certain addresses.