.QCOW File

The qcow image format is one of the disk image formats supported by the QEMU processor emulator. It is a representation of a fixed size block device in a file. Benefits it offers over using raw dump representation include:

• Smaller file size, even on filesystems which don't support holes (i.e. sparse files)
• Copy-on-write support, where the image only represents changes made to an underlying disk image
• Snapshot support, where the image can contain multiple snapshots of the images history
• Optional zlib based compression
• Optional AES encryption

A qcow file extension is related to the QEMU Copy-On-Write file format used to store disk images.

How to open:

Use QEMU to open *.qcow files.

How to convert:

Probably cannot be converted to anything else.