DROID - Digital Record Object Identification

[jimspoon]

I just discovered the DROID software and thought I'd mention it here for those who have never seen it.

Here's the download page:

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/inf ... rds/droid/

Here is a good related tool named Siegfried:

https://www.itforarchivists.com/siegfried
https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried

You may have many files which you can't readily identify the file type, or view, extract the data, or convert. An organization named PRONOM maintains a registry of file types based on "signatures" contained in the file content. DROID will scan your files and identify the file type of each file based on the signatures and the PRONOM registry. The results are presented in a nice GUI that looks like a spreadsheet with lots of columns. The columns include the Format Type, Format Version, and a PUID which links to the PRONOM page describing that format.

Once you have identified the file format with DROID, what do you want to do with the file? You may want to rename the file, give it an appropriate extension so that Windows can open it, or you may want to run it through a converter to convert the file to more modern or more accessible format.

Unfortunately DROID provides no way to do these tasks. It would be great if file managers / searches / renamers / converters could identify files based on the PRONOM/DROID signatures, so that the files could then be manipulated based on this info.

I had a thousands of ancient Word Perfect documents, many without any extensions or non-standard extensions. DROID nicely identified them and also identified the Word Perfect file format version! (5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0) Unfortunately DROID didn't provide any way for me to rename, view, or convert the files. I had a little trouble figuring out exactly how to export the DROID results to CSV but luckily Siegfried did a great job of that. I used Excel to sort results by type, copy file lists to a file renamer (Advanced Renamer), and give the files names and extensions reflecting the file types and versions. Now I'm converting the WordPerfect documents to DOCX and PDF.

Some more related links:
https://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html
https://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html
https://github.com/openpreserve/fido
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRONOM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)
https://www.nchsoftware.com/documentconvert/index.html

[raccoon]

Neat. I love file formats and validating filetype extensions.