Qcow

File Format
Name	Qcow
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Disk Image Formats Qcow
Extension(s)	.qcow, .qcow2

qcow (QEMU Copy on Write) is a disk image format used with the QEMU hosted virtual machine monitor. It can't be mounted directly, but needs a separate utility to read it.

File identification

The starting bytes are (hex) 51 46 49 FB (ASCII QFI.).

Links

• Wikipedia article
• Forensics Wiki article
• qcow image format documentation
• qcow2 image format documentation
• Spec from libqcow project
• libqcow