Aaru Data Preservation Suite v6.0.0-alpha.17

Aaru

Copyright © 2011-2026 Natalia Portillo claunia@claunia.com

You can see user documentation here

What is Aaru?

Aaru (named after the Egyptian paradise where the righteous dwell eternally) is the ultimate Data Preservation Suite — your all-in-one solution for digital media preservation and archival.

Aaru is designed to assist you through the entire workflow of digital media preservation — from the initial creation of disk images (commonly called "dumping") all the way through long-term archival storage.

🔧 Key Features

Media Dumping

Aaru can dump media from virtually any drive you have:

• Magnetic disks (floppy disks, hard drives)
• Optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays)
• Magneto-optical disks (MO discs)
• Flash devices (USB drives, SSDs)
• Memory cards (SD, CF, and more)
• Tapes (various formats)

It works with drives connected via ATA, ATAPI, SCSI, USB, FireWire, and SDHCI interfaces, producing archival-grade images in multiple supported formats.

Hardware Flexibility

You don't need specialized hardware. Aaru will always try to extract the most accurate, archival-quality image from your media using whatever drive you have available. All parameters are fully customizable, with sensible and battle-tested defaults.

Image Management

• Identify existing disk images and get detailed information
• Compare two dumps to verify integrity or find differences
• Convert between supported formats without any data loss

Filesystem Analysis & Extraction

Aaru recognizes dozens of filesystems and can display detailed information about them. For many filesystems, you can extract the complete contents — including all files, extended attributes, and alternate data streams.

Archive & Game Package Support

Beyond disk images, Aaru supports compressed archives and game packages, enabling you to view and extract their contents as part of your preservation workflow.

Dual Interface

Not comfortable with command lines? Aaru includes a modern, fully-featured graphical user interface that makes preservation accessible to everyone.

AaruFormat — The Archival Standard

We provide our own archival-oriented format, AaruFormat, specifically designed for preservation. It stores:

• All data from your media
• Comprehensive metadata
• Full audit information

Metadata Sidecar Generation

Aaru can generate metadata sidecars in an open JSON format, perfect for integration with external systems and third-party software. These sidecars contain all extractable information from any supported image format.

System requirements

Aaru is created using .NET 10 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.

Media image formats we can read

• 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)

Media image formats we can write to

• 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 archives

• ARC (.ARC)
• HA (.HA)
• PAK (.PAK)
• Symbian Installation File (.SIS)
• Xbox 360 Secure Transacted File System (STFS)
• ZOO (.ZOO)

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

Fully supported file-systems (identify and extraction)

• 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

Aaru is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 license. Some components may be licensed under different licenses; see their respective documentation for details.