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-Drive Image 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.

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-Drive Image 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 . Available only in Corporate, Technician , and Commercial licenses.

VDI: A virtual disk file format for the VirtualBox virtual machine. R-Drive Image 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 . Available only in Corporate, Technician , and Commercial licenses.

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

Unlike the image in the RDR format which may contain not only entire hard drives, but also separate disk objects (partitions and free spaces), all other formats can contain only images of entire hard drives. Therefore, R-Drive Image uses some special tricks to bypass this restrictions. Those objects still must be on the same hard drive.

 

The method can be selected on the Image options tab

Imaging results

 

Such images may have the following peculiarity: when an additional object is added to an existing image differentially or incrementally, the second image file will have a virtual unallocated space on the places of the objects already existing in the image. That may sometimes results in the fact that the total free space in the image exceeds the overall disk space.

 

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