April 29th, 2009 by admin

An ISO file is what’s called a disc backup – an exact copy of a CD or a DVD disc. ISO images are typically created as disc backups, but they can also be made “from scratch” using a specialized editor like WinISO. An ISO image can only store a single track of data, so it doesn’t work for music CDs and a few more arcane disc types.

It may help to think of the .iso archive like a kind of archive because it usually contains a number of files and folders. However, unlike general purpose archives (e.g. ZIP or RAR), the ISO format saves everything in uncompressed form. Some proprietary disc archive formats like UIF files and DAA files also support file compression.

To extract an ISO image you will need to install one of the many ISO image tools. There’s a multitude of applications that support the ISO archives, but most of them are either very expensive or simply lack any defining traits that would let you make an informed choice. So which one should you pick? Depending on your goal, there are two applications that I would recommend.

First, if you only need to extract the file, take a look at 7-zip. It’s a free open-source archiver that can open ISO DVD images. It will let you open the DVD archive, but that’s it – 7-zip can’t record, mount or make new .iso archives. It’s a nice no-frills tool and it is available for both Windows and linux computers.

If you need slightly more functionality you will probably want to get a fully-fetured ISO image software like PowerISO. Yes, it’s shareware, but it will let you do practically anything you want with an ISO or .uif files – extract it, edit, load it in a virtual drive, convert to a different format, and burn to a real disc. PowerISO only works on Windows, though.

To summarize, ISO is a popular, open CD archive format that is supported by most CD/DVD applications. Some general-purpose archivers can also extract .iso archives, but they generally can’t do anything else with them.