Publication of Technical Report ECMA TR/111 Overview of Universal Archive Disk Format 1st Edition, December 2022

The 124th General Assembly of ECMA International held in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 2022 approved the ECMA TR/111 Overview of Universal Archive Disk Format (UADF) 1st edition, December 2022 technical report.

This report describes the necessary perspectives for considering a universal volume and file format for interchanging files on archive storage in personal computing and home entertaining environment.

Introduction
To date, many kinds of storage media and storage devices for digital data storage have been used. For example, flexible disk, optical disk, magnetic tape cartridge, SD card, flash drive, HDD, SSD, etc. Each of them has different characteristics in terms of volatility, mutability, accessibility, and addressability, where different management methods for recorded data files and different systemization technologies are applied.

However, it is not easy to manipulate the characteristics properly, especially in personal, home and small office environments. As a result, many files recorded on storage media in the past cannot be recovered due to media age, digital rights management (DRM), compatibility between PC and drive interfaces, drives and media, OS and file systems, applications and file formats, and so on, making storage media unusable. This situation will continue for future generations.

This report describes the necessary perspectives to solve the problems of file system compatibility and also the age of the media and DRM by specifying a volume and file structure for interchanging files in a data archive system capable of preserving data for the long term.

Resource:
ECMA TR/111 Overview of Universal Archive Disk Format (UADF) 1st edition, December 2022 technical report