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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-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 .

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 .

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

Features	RDR	VHD/VHDX	VMDK	VDI
Several objects from different physical drives in one image	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-Drive Image	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

There are tricks to bypass this restriction when only some disk objects are to be imaged. Those objects still must be on the same hard drive.

Method	Unlike the image 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 specialResults
Replicate source disk	The image will contain the click.
Create synthesized disk	A new virtual hard drive will be created. It will contain only the selected disk objects. Windows 11 will be able to mount such images by a double click.entire hard drive with the selected objects. Objects that are not selected for imaging will be replaced with unallocated space. Unallocated spaces in such images are purely virtual objects and will not increase the size of the resulting file. Such images can be bootable when they contain all necessary partitions for bootable devices, but Windows 11 cannot mount such images by a double
Auto	R-Drive Image will automatically select the method. If the image is to contain only one non-bootable object, Create synthesized disk will be selected. Otherwise, R-Drive Image will select Replicate source disk .

The method can be selected on the Image options tab

Disk mode

Imaging results

Disk objects to image

The Replicate source disk method

The Create synthesized disk method

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"

Extensions	Description	Licenses
dmg	Apple Disk Image	All
e01/(ewf)	Expert Witness File Format	Commercial and OEM System Recovery Media
aff	Advanced Forensic Format	Commercial and OEM System Recovery Media

Home > Technical Information > Supported Virtual Disk and Disk Image Formats

Supported Virtual Disk and Disk Image Formats

Home > Technical Information > Supported Virtual Disk and Disk Image Formats