A few days ago, one of my clients sent me a link to a big file which was supposed to contained an img file extension. At first, I thought it was an image so I used my regular image viewer to see what was inside the file. As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
After a quick search, I found at http://file-types.com/ (a blog devoted to cataloging file types and the tools used to manipulate them), IMG is a file format used for creating and exchanging ‘disk images’ commonly used on Mac computers.
These files contain exact “image” copies of every element of DVDs, CDs or floppy disks. Data, filesystem and everything there’s to preserve. This duplication process preserves the disk’s original structure, thereby eliminating any chance of data loss. It also becomes useful when you have a lot of floppy disks or CDs hanging around and you want to store them all in DVDs, saving a lot of room in your CD/DVD case.
There are many programs that allow you to create these images, as well as use them in “virtual disk drives”, allowing you to access the image’s contents as if you were using the actual disk. I can’t tell you how useful that is when you have a lot of disks on your CD case and you want to store them in DVDs but still be able to access the information without writing them to a recordable disk.
All this information was at that website, so I added it to my bookmarks in case I need to check another weird file type. Thumbs up, guys!
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