Harvard Library contracted a comparative study of disk image formats with respect to their adoption and sustainability. The report is available on the website of Harvard Library:
https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/digitalpreservation/Disk+Image+Formats
The report recommends the following disk image file formats for different types of carrier:
- Magnetic storage device - physical sector-by-sector copy or logical file system copy
- uncompressed: RAW (IMG, DD), unless disk image exceeds size limit
- compressed
- RAW (IMG, DD) with TAR.GZ or ZIP compression applied
- E01 using zlib compression option
- Optical storage device - physical sector-by-sector copy
- uncompressed: BIN/CUE
- Optical storage device - logical file system copy
- uncompressed: ISO