The author (my colleague, and probably the most talented developer I know) isn&#x27;t replacing HDF5 with a &#x27;proprietary binary format&#x27;: in fact, the transition is as simple as replacing &quot;HDF5 group&quot; with &quot;folder in a filesystem&quot;, &quot;HDF5 dataset&quot; with &quot;binary file on the filesystem&quot; (ie you store each array item sequentially on disk, exactly as HDF5 or any other format will store it, which you can memmap trivially with any programming language), and &quot;HDF5 attribute&quot; with &quot;JSON &#x2F; XML &#x2F; INI &#x2F; text file&quot;.<p>&quot;When in the field and the system shits the bed&quot;, to quote you... you can just open the dataset in Windows Explorer. Or Mac OS Finder. Or Nautilus. Or using &#x27;cd&#x27; and &#x27;ls&#x27; in Linux. Want to look at an array? Sure, open it in a hex editor or Python or, heck, FORTRAN88. You can .tar up your folder (or subfolder, or any arbitrary subset of the dataset) and send it to someone with no knowledge of the format whatsoever, and they&#x27;ll be able to make sense of it in minutes. This isn&#x27;t anything remotely complex - it&#x27;s just using the filesystem rather than creating a filesystem-within-a-filesystem. Want to keep track of changes in your massive dataset? Sure, just back it up on Mac OS X Time Machine, or a simple rsync script, or even Git LFS.<p>Most researchers aren&#x27;t computer scientists; they know how to use Dropbox and Notepad++ and open text files, and they don&#x27;t want to have to install a Java-based HDF5View when they could just use Windows Explorer.<p>It&#x27;s not even that HDF5 is <i>that bad</i>, it&#x27;s just that filesystems are, in many respects, <i>so much better</i>.<p>(If it wasn&#x27;t clear from the article, we&#x27;re not just misinformed - we&#x27;re making this call after having developed an entire software suite around HDF5, spent about two years of firefighting HDF5 issues and wasted days of development time (so many horror stories) - this is actual feedback from several dozen users, thousands of datasets, and petabytes of data.)