Translations:Maintenance: Preservation, Development and Migrations/18/en

Format and obsolesce. In the pre-ingest phase, we made sure that all our files were in formats that were operational and could be opened and properly displayed by currently available software. Similarly, in the maintenance phase, we need to schedule regular audits of our file formats to ensure that they are not in danger of becoming obsolete. If we find that a format we are using is becoming obsolete or that support for it will be discontinued, we need to act, which usually means migrating files to a newer or more suitable format. For both file format monitoring and migration we can use specialized software tools, some of which we already mentioned.