I have a large raw data file (up to 1GB) which contains raw samples from a USB data logger.

I need to store extra information relating to the file (sample rate, description, trigger point, last seek position etc) and was looking into adding this as a some sort of header.

The header file should ideally be human readable and flexible so I've so far ruled out some sort of binary serialization into a header.

I also want to avoid two separate files as they could end up separated when copied or backed up. I remembered somebody telling me that newer *.*x Microsoft Office documents are actually a number of files in a zip. Is there a simple way to achieve this? Could I still keep the quick seek times to the raw file?