When saving a project to disk, the file that is written will have an aot extension (the prefix must contain at least three characters!) and is usually referred to as an “AOT file”. AOT files can be emailed to other people for viewing in the OT, but once a project has been submitted, a Co-I can also retrieve it from the ALMA archive and view it in read-only mode.
There have been reports of users encountering problems with saving to disk and, upon reading the file back in, get a “ZLIB input stream” error due to the file being empty. The reason for this has never been tracked down, mainly due to this error occurring very rarely. In response to this, the $HOME/.almaot directory contains a subdirectory in which backups of projects are regularly made. This may allow the recovery of a corrupted project.