Today marks a major milestone in the development of libaaruformat: we’ve achieved full feature parity with Aaru.
This means that all features supported in AaruFormat v1 can now be read through libaaruformat—and, importantly, they can also be replicated in AaruFormat v2.
What’s Included
Feature parity covers a wide range of capabilities, including (but not limited to):
- Compression
- Deduplication
- Long sector reading and writing (2352 bytes on CD, 2064 bytes on DVD)
- Storage of decrypted DVD title keys
- Apple Lisa sector tags
- Tape image files and partitions
- CICM XML and Aaru JSON metadata blocks
- Dump hardware lists
Beyond Parity: New in AaruFormat v2
AaruFormat v2 already introduces its first exclusive feature: multi-level deduplication tables.
This enhancement significantly improves RAM and storage efficiency when working with very large disk dumps—ranging from multiple gigabytes to terabytes.
What’s Next
With parity achieved, the next phase of development will focus on adding entirely new features, such as:
- Data positioning measurement
- Snapshots
- Parent images
- And more innovations to come
Following this, we’ll begin integrating libaaruformat directly into Aaru. Future alpha releases will use it to generate v2 dumps.
⚠️ Note: As with all alpha releases, we cannot guarantee the exactness of dumps or the long-term compatibility of images created with them.
