Digital Archiving: When to Convert, When to Preserve Raw Formats

Every digital packrat I know has the same moment of panic: it's 2026, you're cleaning out old drives, and you find a folder from 2015 full of files. Half are in formats you don't even recognize anymore. QuickTime movies. PSD files. Some proprietary camera RAW format. And you wonder: should I have converted all this stuff years ago to keep it safe?

The answer is complicated, but I'll make it simple: the best archive strategy isn't "convert everything" or "keep everything raw." It's both.

The Real Problem with Raw Formats

Proprietary RAW formats are beautiful and terrible at the same time. A Canon EOS RAW file contains all the unprocessed sensor data—massive quality potential. But it's encoded in a format that only Canon's software (or a handful of third-party tools) can properly decode. What happens in 2055 when Canon decides they're done supporting that camera model? When the company doesn't exist?

It's happened. DSD audio (from SACD) is essentially unplayable now unless you have ancient hardware or esoteric software. Proprietary video codecs from the 2000s? Good luck. The format itself isn't the problem—it's the assumption that the tools to read it will always exist.

This is why archivists panic. Organizations like the Library of Congress spent millions digitizing film and video, only to realize their "formats" were vendor-locked and disappearing fast. So yes, there's a real case for conversion: converting proprietary formats to open standards is insurance against format obsolescence.

But Converting Has Its Own Costs

Here's what everyone forgets: every conversion is a compression event. You lose data.

Convert a RAW photo to TIFF and you've already made irreversible decisions about color space, exposure, and processing. Convert a lossless FLAC audio file to MP3 and yes, you've thrown away information. Convert DSD audio to standard PCM and you've lost the entire point of high-res audio.

Sometimes that's fine. If you're archiving family vacation photos, JPEG is more than adequate. But if you're dealing with work you might want to reprocess in 20 years—when new color science, AI upscaling, or other techniques become available—you want the RAW, uncompressed original sitting safely alongside your converted backup.

And here's the kicker: technology gets better. In 2015, we couldn't upscale photos without them looking like garbage. Now? ML-powered upscaling is legitimately good. If you'd converted all your old RAW files to 8-bit JPEG, you can't go back. The information is gone.

The Smart Archive Strategy: Dual-Format Storage

This is what museums, the Smithsonian, and serious digital archivists actually do. It's not complicated:

• Keep the original in whatever format it came in. RAW, PSD, DSD, whatever. This is your master. Lock it away.
• Create archival copies in open, standardized formats. RAW → DNG. TIFF. Uncompressed or lossless compressed.
• Create access copies in modern, practical formats. DNG or TIFF for long-term storage, but also JPG for browsing, MP3 for listening, etc.

The cost? It's storage. And storage is cheap now. A 4TB external drive costs $60. Keeping both your original Canon RAW files *and* DNG copies doesn't cost you anything meaningful. You're protecting against two futures at once: a future where DNG becomes obsolete (you have the Canon RAW), and a future where Canon RAW format becomes undecodable (you have the DNG).

Format Decision Tree

Not everything deserves three copies. Here's how to decide:

Master raw files (photography, video, music production): Keep originals + create open archival copies. Use batch conversion tools to generate DNG or TIFF copies automatically. Storage is cheap. Regretting the loss of original data later is expensive.

Documents (PDFs, Word files, old scans): Convert to PDF/A (the archival PDF format). This is designed to last. It's open, well-documented, and explicitly designed to survive software obsolescence. One copy is enough. Old .DOC files from 2002? Convert to PDF/A now. Microsoft Office formats change constantly; PDF/A doesn't.

Photos for everyday use: JPEG is fine. If you care about the image, you already kept the RAW anyway.

Audio archives: Keep lossless masters (FLAC or WAV). FLAC is open-source and specifically designed for archival audio. Yes, it takes more space than MP3, but you can generate an MP3 copy instantly if you need portability.

Video: This is tricky because video codecs are genuinely complex. For critical archives, store the original file AND a ProRes or DNxHD intermediate. These are professional formats widely used in post-production, so they'll be supported for decades. ProRes is actually getting more standardized, not less.

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule (Still the Best)

Format decisions matter, but storage strategy matters more. Even perfect formats die if all your copies are in one place.

• 3 copies of anything irreplaceable
• 2 different media types (don't keep 3 copies all on hard drives)
• 1 offsite (fire, theft, or water damage in your house shouldn't destroy everything)

For actual archives: original files on your working drive, backup #1 on an external drive you keep at home, backup #2 on another external drive at a friend's house or safety deposit box. Or use cloud backup for the offsite copy—cloud services like AWS Glacier are designed for exactly this use case.

Yes, this sounds paranoid. Until you have a hard drive failure at the same time your apartment gets flooded. Then it sounds like genius planning.

The Tools That Make This Easy

Batch conversion is where most people fail. Keeping original files is easy—just don't delete them. But creating DNG copies of 10,000 photos? Converting a library of old DOC files to PDF/A? That's where automated tools save your sanity.

Use batch conversion tools to automate document migrations. For photos, use Lightroom's built-in DNG conversion or batch image conversion services. For audio, ffmpeg can convert entire music libraries to FLAC in the background.

The key is automation. You're not doing this manually. You're setting up a one-time conversion job that runs overnight, and then your archive is protected.

One More Thing: Metadata and Tags

Here's something archivists never mention but should: your files are worthless without metadata. A folder full of JPEGs from 2003 with no dates, no filenames, no description—is that a vacation? Work photos? Recipes? Future you won't know.

Before you archive anything, name it properly. "2026-08-04-family-camping-trip" beats "DSC_1234". Add EXIF data where relevant. Keep a text file with context. A spreadsheet linking filenames to what they are.

The best format in the world is useless if your archive is a cryptic mess of unnamed folders from 2019.

Checking Your Archives Regularly

Here's the part nobody likes: archiving isn't a one-time project. Every few years, you need to:

• Open a few random files to make sure they still work
• Check that your external drives still power up (drives can fail silently)
• When major OS updates happen, test a few conversions to make sure tools still work properly
• Update your format strategy if better options emerge (like when DNG became the photographic standard)

This isn't paranoia. It's the difference between an archive that actually survives and one that rots in the corner of your cloud storage, unreadable and forgotten.

The Bottom Line

Don't convert everything. Don't keep everything raw. Do both.

For anything irreplaceable: master copy in original format + archival copy in open standard. For everything else: use common sense. Family photos? JPEG is fine. Professional work? Archive-quality formats. Store in three places. Check occasionally.

It's not sexy. It's not flashy. But future you—the one digging through your files in 2040—will be genuinely grateful.