[R] Archive format

[Jeff Newmiller]

The relevance to R (and therefore R-help) of this question is marginal at best. R might not be the language of choice when you go retrieve the data. 

Also, this question seems dangerously close to a troll, because the obvious answer is that the data should be in an open format but if you are not currently working with data in an open format then you increase the cost of archiving and risk losing information up front by extracting it from a proprietary format, and balancing those concerns is more political than technical. 

Note that there exist open binary formats, and the goals of your archiving task and nature of the data would have to be considered in deciding which of the many to use. My own experience has been that plain text survives time best, but YMMV.
-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On March 29, 2017 1:44:21 AM PDT, Joe Gain <joe.gain at uni-konstanz.de> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>we are collecting information on the subject of research data
>management 
>in German on the webplatform:
>
>www.forschungsdaten.info
>
>One of the topics, which we are writing about, is how to *archive*
>data. 
>Unfortunately, none of us in the project is an expert with respect to R
>
>and so I would like to ask the list, what they recommend? A related 
>question is to do with the sharing of data. We have already asked some 
>academics, who have basically replied that they don't really know other
>
>than to strongly recommend a plain text format.
>
>We would also like to know, if members of the list recommend converting
>
>formats from commercial software such as S-Plus, Terr, SPSS etc. to an 
>R-compatible format for long term archivation? Are there any general 
>rules and best practices, when it comes to archiving (and sharing) 
>statistical data and statistical programs?
>
>Any comments would be much appreciated!
>Joe