Disk images

archive file of an optical disc

computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume

file that is composed of one or more computer files along with metadata; used to collect multiple data files together into a single file for easier portability and storage, or simply to compress files to use less storage space

disk image file format developed by Apple and commonly used by macOS

file format

file format

qcow is a file format for disk image files used by QEMU, a hosted virtual machine monitor. It stands for "QEMU Copy On Write" and uses a disk storage optimization strategy that delays allocation of storage until it is actually needed. Files in qcow format can contain a variety of disk images which are generally associated with specific guest operating systems. Two versions of the format exist: qcow and qcow2 which use the .qcow and .qcow2 file extensions, respectively. An intermediate development version was called qcow3, but all results were integrated into qcow2, so this name never became an

VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

Partimage is a disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments. Partimage can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Utilities such as Partimage are useful in a number of situations which are commonly encountered by network administrators as well as advanced computer users who maintain their own systems. The last stable release was in 2010; since then, one of Partimage's authors has worked on FSArchiver, which has broader functionality than Partimage.

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file format for disk images