Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

USDA Logo U.S. Department of Agriculture

One objective of the archiving program is to minimize the effort required to maintain the data publication. In part, this means trying to avoid maintaining versions of the data in multiple formats or updating formats periodically. Another objective is to make the data and metadata as accessible as possible across computing platforms, again while minimizing the use of multiple file formats.

These objectives and NARA recommendations have led to the following typical file formats for data we publish:

*prefer lossless when possible

https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/usingFormats