To satisfy the needs of meteorological modernization construction and to ensure the safety of meteorological record files for surface automatic meteorological stations, the characteristics and types of electronic documents are discussed. The adequate formats of the electronic documents are important for the safety of electronic files. There are two types of the document formats: plain text files and database files, of which the characteristics are analyzed repectively. It is suggested that pure text documents are safer than dafabase files, while database files are more convenient to use than pure text files. Thus, if both types are copied, the data from automatic meteorological stations will be safe and convenient to use.