Aaru Data Preservation Suite v6.0.0-alpha9

Aaru

Copyright © 2011-2025 Natalia Portillo claunia@claunia.com

You can see user documentation here

Aaru is a fully featured media dump management solution. You usually know media dumps as disc images, disk images, tape images, etc.

With Aaru you can identify a media dump, extract files from it (for supported filesystems), compare two of them, create them from real media using the appropriate drive, create a sidecar metadata with information about the media dump, and a lot of other features that commonly would require you to use separate applications.

To see last changes, check the changelog. To see list of pending things to do, check the list of issues.

If you want to contribute in any way please read the contributing guide.

Stable releases in Github.

System requirements

Aaru is created using .NET 7 and can be compiled with all the major IDEs. To run it you require to use one of the stable releases, or build it yourself.

Usage

aaru.exe

And read help.

Or read the documentation.

Features

• Identifies a disk image getting information about the disk itself and shows information about partitions and filesystems inside them
• Can checksum the disks (and if optical disc, separate tracks) user-data (tags and metadata coming soon)
• Can compare two disk images, even different formats, for different sectors and/or metadata
• Can list and extract contents from supported archives
• Can list and extract contents from supported filesystems
• Can read several disk image formats.
• Can read several known sector by sector formats with variable bytes per sector.
• Can read standard sector by sector copies for optical and magnetic discs with constant bytes per sector.
• Can verify sectors or disk images if supported by the underlying format
• Can dump media from ATA, ATAPI, SCSI, USB, FireWire and SDHCI drives (magnetic disks, optical discs, magnetoptical disks, flash devices, memory cards and tapes) to several supported image formats.
• Can convert between image formats.
• Includes an open-source archival image format with compression and deduplication.
• Can create standard open XML metadata from existing images.
• Can measure readability and speed of media (same that can be dumped, MHDD style)
• Has an online database with drive capabilities, and can report the capabilities of any drive.
• Works on any operating system and architecture where .NET Core is supported (drive access requires Windows or Linux).
• Has a graphical interface (work in progress)

Supported disk image formats (read-only)

• Apple Disk Archival/Retrieval Tool (DART)
• Apple II nibble images (NIB)
• BlindWrite 4 TOC files (.BWT/.BWI/.BWS)
• BlindWrite 5/6 TOC files (.B5T/.B5I and .B6T/.B6I)
• CopyQM
• CPCEMU Disk file and Extended Disk File
• Dave Dunfield IMD
• DiscJuggler images
• Dreamcast GDI
• HD-Copy disk images
• MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD)
• Microsoft VHDX
• Nero Burning ROM (both image formats)
• Partclone disk images
• Partimage disk images
• Quasi88 disk images (.D77/.D88)
• Spectrum floppy disk image (.FDI)
• TeleDisk
• X68k DIM disk image files (.DIM)

Supported disk image formats (read and write)

• Alcohol 120% Media Descriptor Structure (.MDS/.MDF)
• Anex86 disk images (.FDI for floppies, .HDI for hard disks)
• Any 512 bytes/sector disk image format (sector by sector copy, aka raw)
• Apple 2IMG (used with Apple // emulators)
• Apple DiskCopy 4.2
• Apple ][ Interleaved Disk Image
• Apple Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF), including obsolete (previous than DiskCopy 6) versions
• Apridisk disk image formats (for ACT Apricot disks)
• Basic Lisa Utility
• CDRDAO TOC sheets
• CDRWin cue/bin cuesheets, including ones with ISOBuster extensions
• CisCopy disk image (aka DC-File, .DCF)
• CloneCD
• CopyTape
• DataPackRat's d2f/f2d disk image format ("WC DISK IMAGE")
• Digital Research DiskCopy
• DiskDupe (DDI)
• Aaru Format
• IBM SaveDskF
• MAXI Disk disk images (HDK)
• Most known sector by sector copies of floppies with 128, 256, 319 and 1024 bytes/sector.
• Most known sector by sector copies with different bytes/sector on track 0.
• Parallels Hard Disk Image (HDD) version 2
• QEMU Copy-On-Write versions 1, 2 and 3 (QCOW and QCOW2)
• QEMU Enhanced Disk (QED)
• Ray Arachelian's Disk IMage (.DIM)
• RS-IDE hard disk images
• Sector by sector copies of Microsoft's DMF floppies
• T98 hard disk images (.THD)
• T98-Next hard disk images (.NHD)
• Virtual98 disk images
• VirtualBox Disk Image (VDI)
• Virtual PC fixed size, dynamic size and differencing (undo) disk images
• VMware VMDK and COWD images
• XDF disk images (as created by IBM's XDFCOPY)

Supported disk image formats (read-only)

• Symbian Installation File (.SIS)

Supported partitioning schemes

• Acorn Linux and RISCiX partitions
• ACT Apricot partitions
• Amiga Rigid Disk Block (RDB)
• Apple Partition Map
• Atari AHDI and ICDPro
• BSD disklabels
• BSD slices inside MBR
• DEC disklabels
• DragonFly BSD 64-bit disklabel
• EFI GUID Partition Table (GPT)
• Human68k (Sharp X68000) partitions table
• Microsoft/IBM/Intel Master Boot Record (MBR)
• Minix subpartitions inside MBR
• NEC PC9800 partitions
• NeXT disklabel
• Plan9 partition table
• Rio Karma partitions
• SGI volume headers
• Solaris slices inside MBR
• Sun disklabel
• UNIX VTOC and disklabel
• UNIX VTOC inside MBR
• Xbox 360 hard coded partitions
• XENIX partition table

Supported file systems for read-only operations

• 3DO Opera file system
• Apple DOS file system
• Apple Lisa file system
• Apple Macintosh File System (MFS)
• CD-i file system
• Commodore 1540/1541/1571/1581 filesystems
• CP/M file system
• High Sierra Format
• ISO9660, including Apple, Amiga, Rock Ridge, Joliet and Romeo extensions
• Microsoft 12-bit File Allocation Table (FAT12), including Atari ST extensions
• Microsoft 16-bit File Allocation Table (FAT16)
• Microsoft 32-bit File Allocation Table (FAT32), including FAT+ extension
• U.C.S.D Pascal file system
• Xbox filesystems

Supported file systems for identification and information only

• Acorn Advanced Disc Filing System
• Alexander Osipov DOS (AO-DOS for Electronika BK-0011) file system
• Amiga Fast File System v2, untested
• Amiga Fast File System, with international characters, directory cache and multi-user patches
• Amiga Original File System, with international characters, directory cache and multi-user patches
• Apple File System (preliminary detection until on-disk layout is stable)
• Apple Hierarchical File System (HFS)
• Apple Hierarchical File System+ (HFS+)
• Apple ProDOS / SOS file system
• AtheOS file system
• BeOS filesystem
• BSD Fast File System (FFS) / Unix File System (UFS)
• BSD Unix File System 2 (UFS2)
• B-tree file system (btrfs)
• Coherent UNIX file system
• Cram file system
• DEC Files-11 (only checked with On Disk Structure 2, ODS-2)
• DEC RT-11 file system
• dump(8) (Old historic BSD, AIX, UFS and UFS2 types)
• ECMA-67: 130mm Flexible Disk Cartridge Labelling and File Structure for Information Interchange
• Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS)
• Fossil file system (from Plan9)
• HAMMER file system
• High Performance Optical File System (HPOFS)
• HP Logical Interchange Format
• IBM Journaling File System (JFS)
• Linux extended file system
• Linux extended file system 2
• Linux extended file system 3
• Linux extended file system 4
• Locus file system
• MicroDOS file system
• Microsoft Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT)
• Microsoft/IBM High Performance File System (HPFS)
• Microsoft New Technology File System (NTFS)
• Microsoft Resilient File System (ReFS)
• Minix v2 file system
• Minix v3 file system
• NEC PC-Engine executable
• NEC PC-FX executable
• NILFS2
• Nintendo optical filesystems (GameCube and Wii)
• OS-9 Random Block File
• Professional File System
• QNX4 and QNX6 filesystems
• Reiser file systems
• SGI Extent File System (EFS)
• SGI XFS
• SmartFileSystem
• SolarOS file system
• Squash file system
• UNICOS file system
• Universal Disk Format (UDF)
• UNIX System V file system
• UNIX Version 7 file system
• UnixWare boot file system
• Veritas file system
• VMware file system (VMFS)
• Xenix file system
• Xia filesystem
• Zettabyte File System (ZFS)

Supported checksums

• Adler-32
• CRC-16
• CRC-32
• CRC-64
• Fletcher-16
• Fletcher-32
• MD5
• SHA-1
• SHA-2 (256, 384 and 512 bits)
• SpamSum (fuzzy hashing)

Supported filters

• Apple PCExchange (FINDER.DAT & RESOURCE.FRK)
• AppleDouble
• AppleSingle
• BZip2
• GZip
• LZip
• MacBinary I, II, III
• XZ

Partially supported disk image formats

These disk image formats cannot be read, but their contents can be checksummed on sidecar creation

• DiscFerret
• KryoFlux STREAM
• SuperCardPro

License