Virtual disk image

A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc or USB flash drive. A disk image is usually made by creating a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium, thereby perfectly replicating the structure and contents of a storage device independent of the file system. Depending on the disk image format, a disk image may span one or more computer files.

The file format may be an open standard, such as the ISO image format for optical disc images, or a disk image may be unique to a particular software application.

The size can be huge because it contains the contents of an entire disk. To reduce storage requirements, if an imaging utility is filesystem-aware it can omit copying unused space, and it can compress the used space.

Disk images were originally (in the late 1960s) used for backup and disk cloning of mainframe disk media, the early ones were as small as 5 megabytes and as large as 330 megabytes, and the copy medium was magnetic tape, which ran as large as 200 megabytes per reel. Disk images became much more popular when floppy disk media became popular, where replication or storage of an exact structure was necessary and efficient, especially in the case of copy protected floppy disks.

Disk images are used heavily for duplication of optical media including DVDs, Blu-ray disks, etc. It is also used to make perfect clones of hard disks.

A virtual disk may emulate any type of physical drive, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, key drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD or a network share among others; and of course, since it is not physical, requires a virtual reader device matched to it (see below). An emulated drive is typically created either in RAM for fast read/write access (known as a RAM disk), or on a hard drive. Typical uses of virtual drives include the mounting of disk images of CDs and DVDs, and the mounting of virtual hard disks for the purpose of on the fly disk encryption ("OTFE").

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Wikipedia