Xena attempts to avoid digital obsolescence by converting files into an openly specified format, such as ODF or PNG.
The resulting .xena file is plain text, although the content of the data itself is not directly human-readable.
The exact original file can be retrieved by stripping the metadata and reversing the Base64 encoding, using an internal viewer.
Platforms supported by Xena are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Xena uses a series of plugins to identify file formats and convert them to an appropriate openly specified format.
Xena can create plain text versions of file formats such as TIFF, Word and PDF, with the use of Tesseract (software).