The Advanced Forensic Format --- AFF(tm) --- is an extensible open
format for the storage of disk images and related forensic
information.

- Open format, free from any patent or license restriction.
  Can be used with both open-source and proprietary forensic tools.
- Extensible. Any amount of metadata can be encoded in AFF files in the
  format of name/value pairs.
- Efficient. AFF supports both compression and seeking within
  compressed files.
- Open Source C/C++ Implementation. A freely redistributable C/C++
  implementation including the AFF Library and basic conversion tools
  is available for download. AFFLIB(tm) is being distributed under the BSD
  license, allowing it to be incorporated in free and proprietary
  programs without the need to pay license fees.
- Byte-order independent. AFFLib has been tested on both Intel and
  PowerPC-based systems. Images created on one platform can be read on
  another.
- Automatic calculation and storage of MD5 and SHA-1 hash codes,
  allowing AFF files to be automatically validated after they are
  copied to check for accidentally corruption.
- Explicit identification of sectors that could not be read from the
  original disk.
- Planned support for digital signatures and direct authoring of AFF
  files using dd_recover.