Disk images
There are various types of disk image formats. For clarity the formats are divided by means of their original purpose, e.g. were they intended to be used in (disk) forensics or virtualization.
Disk images are usually block by block copies of the original data source. Depending on the data source, the blocks can be bytes, sectors, clusters, pages or similar. The disk image format may be further enhanced with additional information, such as error detection, error correction, data digest (hash, and compression.
Forensics Disk Image formats
Forensics File Formats
- Advanced Forensics Format (aff)
- Advanced Forensic Framework 4 (aff4)
- Expert Witness Compression Format (ewf)
- gfzip
- ProDiscover image file format
- Raw Image Format
- sgzip
Virtualization Disk Image formats
- Open Virtualization Format (ovf)
- Parallels Virtual Hard Disk Format
- QCOW Image Format
- Virtual Disk Image (vdi)
- Virtual Hard Disk (vhd)
- VMWare Virtual Disk Format (vmdk)
Other Disk Image formats
Mac OS X has support for various disk image types build-in, some of which are:
- read-write disk image (.dmg): raw, UDIF, NDIF
- Sparse disk image (.spareimage)
- Sparse bundle disk image (.sparsebundle)