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Supported Virtual Disk and Disk Image Formats


Along with file formats used for purely disk backup and imaging purposes, there are file formats for virtual disks. Virtual disks are software components that emulates data storage devices in virtual machines. A the same time, virtual disks can be used for disk backup and imaging, too. That is why it’s expedient for disk backup and imaging software to support various file formats for virtual disks. This is especially important for system interoperability, when it’s necessary to use disk backup/image files on other machines where the disk backup and imaging software isn’t installed.

Currently R-Studio supports the following virtual disk and disk image formats:

RDR: A proprietary disk image format developed by R-Tools Technology, Inc (R-TT) . It is the main format in R-Drive Image , R-Studio , R-Linux , and R-Undelete . RDR files are interchangeable, that is, any R-TT program may load and process, within its capabilities, any rdr file created in another R-TT program.

 

The following image formats can be created only in the R-Studio Corporate and Technician/T80+ versions:

VHD/VHDX: A virtual disk file format built into Windows. It’s a native virtual hard drive for Hyper-V, the Windows virtual machine. You may read more about these file formats in Wikipedia: VHD (file format) . R-Studio creates a special file with some metadata for the VHD file format, its extension is vhr. The VHDX file format contains this metadata within its main file.

VMDK: A virtual disk file format for the most virtual machines like VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop for Mac, etc. You may read more about these file format in our Glossary: What is a VMDK Virtual Disk .

VDI: A virtual disk file format for the VirtualBox virtual machine. R-Studio creates a special file with some metadata for the VDI file format, its extension is vdr. You may read more about these file format in Wikipedia: VDI .

R-Studio Standalone can load these image formats.

 

The main features of these file formats are presented in the table below:

Features

RDR

VHD/VHDX

VMDK

VDI

Several objects in one file

Yes

No

No

No

Compression

Yes

No

Yes

No

Encryption

Yes

No

No

No

Image Split

Yes

No

Yes

No

Native mounting on Windows

No

Yes

No

No

Mounting on Windows

using R-Studio

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

 

Additional file formats that can be opened "read-only"

Extensions

Description

Licenses

dmg

Apple Disk Image

All

e01/(ewf)

Expert Witness File Format

Technician/T80+

aff

Advanced Forensic Format

Technician/T80+