Direct Access Archive
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (April 2008) |
 | This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. (March 2009) |
| Filename extension |
.daa |
|---|---|
| Developed by | PowerISO Computing, Inc. |
| Type of format | Disk image |
Direct Access Archive, or DAA, is a proprietary file format developed by PowerISO Computing for disk image files. The format supports features such as compression, password protection, and splitting to multiple volumes. Popular disk image mounting programs such as Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools currently do not support the mounting of DAA images.
Currently there is no published information about the format. Among mainstream applications, it can be opened or converted with PowerISO and MagicISO. Various free open source packages are also available to convert DAA to ISO images.
File Structure
Although lacking official documentation, DAA image files seem to be zlib-compressed ISO images without any added functionality in comparison to ISO. It thus offers no advantage to a zipped ISO image and can be considered a case of vendor lock-in.[1]
Converting into ISO
PowerISO provides free command-line tools for Linux and Mac OS X which allow the user to extract DAA files or convert them into ISO format, however the tools haven't been updated to support the newest version of the DAA format. The PowerISO Windows trial version only supports converting images from DAA files up to 300MB[1], less than half of the capacity of a standard CD.
AcetoneISO 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 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. A brief tutorial for using daa2iso is available here.
For MacOS X , DAA Converter is a native GUI application which wraps the command-line tool, daa2iso, by Luigi Auriemma (GNU license).
Graphical versions of daa2iso have also been made available for Windows and Mac OS X (see external links below).
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
External links
Related Utilities
- daa2iso application for Windows (source code included, and may be compiled for *nix / MacOSX without modification)
- DAA Converter for Mac OS X, graphical Mac interface for daa2iso
References
- ^ Text file in daa2iso: http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz.htm