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. Then again, there is the new XML - based PDF format. Interesting. See Adobe Mars project

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?
5. PDF's can be encrypted. (It's part of the spec.)

Wikipedia entry on PDF

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.