Personal Ancestral File (PAF) 5

Unknown

dataset

Personal Ancestral File was the name a genealogy software program made available by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. PAF is the native data format of the software, which was discontinued in 2013.

Identify it

Extensions	`.paf`
MIME types	`application/octet-stream`
Signatures	`3530300035303000504146` at byte 0 (PAF 5)
PRONOM	`fmt/856`
Wikidata	`Q29167894`

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Open it

FFmpegOpen sourcereads · LGPL-2.1-or-later / GPL-2.0-or-later
PhotoRecOpen sourcereads · GNU General Public License
Personal Ancestral Filereads and writes · freeware
My Family Treereads
Family Tree Maker 2009reads
Legacy Family Tree Deluxereads
Personal Historianreads
RootsMagic 3reads

Convert it

To	With	Fidelity	Command and losses
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) 1.2.1	FFmpeg	Partial	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.flac` Audio track only: the video is dropped.
Waveform Audio	FFmpeg	Partial	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.wav` Audio track only: the video is dropped.
Matroska 1-4	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.mkv` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.
MPEG 1/2 Audio Layer 3	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.mp3` Lossy re-encoding.
MPEG-4 Part 14	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.mp4` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.
Ogg	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.ogg` Lossy re-encoding.
WebM	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.paf out.webm` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.

Sources

From PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-20.

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