Disk Images

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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.

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

• 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)
• Sparse disk image (.spareimage)
• Sparse bundle disk image (.sparsebundle)