Alcohol 52% vs libguestfs

Alcohol 52% creates virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives so users can play discs without the physical media. It supports up to 31 virtual drives and can mount optical images in formats including CCD, CUE, ISO, BWF, CDI, MDS, and NRG. The listed downloads are for Windows, excluding Windows 98 and ME. A free 15-day evaluation period is available, with capabilities limited only by the number of virtual drives available. The Free Edition is also listed at free and is marked not for business use. A paid single licence costs 27.00 USD once and includes lifetime free upgrades; online activation is required. The maker describes home users backing up game CDs and movie DVDs, as well as librarians and school administrators archiving recordable media. DVD titles protected with CSS cannot be backed up due to legal restrictions. Support options include manuals, FAQs, a support forum, and direct email contact. The privacy policy says users may choose to join the Bright Data network for some premium features and can turn that setting off in the app.

libguestfs is a free library and toolset for working with virtual machine disk images. It can inspect and edit guest files, script changes, create or resize images, make backups, clone virtual machines and build them. The project says it can access almost any disk image, including those from VMware and Hyper-V, and images created by VMware, KVM, qemu, VirtualBox, Xen and other hypervisors; libvirt is not required. Its command-line tools include guestfish, a scriptable shell, and virt-rescue, an interactive rescue shell. The C library has bindings for many languages, with examples for C/C++, Erlang, Go, Java, Lua, OCaml, Perl, Python and Ruby. Guest filesystems are accessed through a Linux kernel in a qemu virtual machine, usually as a non-root user; sVirt with libvirt and SELinux can also be used. It runs on many Linux distributions and Mac OS X, while some virt tools have been ported to Windows. Non-Linux systems may require compiling from source and porting.