Direct Access Archive, or DAA, is a proprietary file format developed by PowerISO Computing for

disk image A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is us ...

files. The format supports features such as compression, password protection, and splitting to multiple volumes. Popular Windows disk image mounting programs such as

Alcohol 120% Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. It can create and mount disc images in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format. Images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files. Alcohol 120% can also convert imag ...

and

Daemon Tools DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Overview DAEMON tools was originally a successor of ''Generic SafeDisc emulator'' and incorporated all of its features. The program claims t ...

currently do not support the mounting of DAA images; Linux and BSD also do not support mounting images of this kind. Currently there is no published information about the format. Among mainstream applications, it can be opened or converted with

MagicISO MagicISO (also referred to as MagicISO Maker) is a CD/DVD image shareware utility that can extract, edit, create, and burn disc image files. It offers the possibility of converting between ISO image, ISO and Cue sheet (computing), CUE/BIN and the ...

and

UltraISO UltraISO is a crippleware application for Microsoft Windows for creating, modifying and converting ISO image files used for optical disc authoring, currently being produced by EZB Systems. Initially UltraISO was shareware however since 2006 it ...

. Various free and open-source packages are also available to convert DAA to ISO images.

File Structure

Although lacking official documentation, DAA image files are

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also a ...

- or lzma-compressed

ISO image An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. IS ...

s chunk by chunk.

Conversion

''PowerISO'' provides free command-line tools for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

which allow the user to extract DAA files or convert them into

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

format, however these tools have not been updated to support the newest version of the DAA format. The PowerISO

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

trial version only supports converting images from DAA files up to 300MB, less than half of the capacity of a standard CD. ''

AcetoneISO AcetoneISO is a free and open-source virtual drive software to mount and manage image files. Its goals are to be simple, intuitive and stable. Written in Qt, this software is meant for all those people looking for a "Daemon Tools for Linux". Ho ...

'' is a free CD/DVD management application for Linux that can convert DAA to ISO with the help of the external PowerISO command-line tool for Linux. ''daa2iso'' is an open source

command line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

application has been developed to convert DAA files to ISO files. The program comes with a Windows binary and source code which compiles under Unix-like operating systems. daa2iso allows users to select the .daa file, and the location for the .iso output via standard windows open and save dialogs For Mac OS X, ''DAA Converter''DAA Converter for Mac OS X
/ref> is a GUI application which wraps the daa2iso command-line tool (GNU license).

Features

Due to using freely available compression algorithms, DAA includes the following features that are absent in ISO (but can be obtained by manually compressing ISO files): *Ability to compress images, thus saving space and allowing smaller downloads *Can be password protected *Can be split into multiple smaller files

References

External links

PowerISO Website
{{Disk_images Disk images Archive formats