Direct Access Archive
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 | 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]
Convertion
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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 these 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[2], 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[3] 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.
For Mac OS X, DAA Converter[4] 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
External links
References
- ^ Text file in daa2iso: http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz.htm
- ^ [1]
- ^ daa2iso application for Windows
- ^ DAA Converter for Mac OS X