In addition to offering decent levels of compression, DMG files also support 128- and 256-bit AES encryption, which means you can make a compressed folder that’s password protected. Yes, you can, and doing so is more useful than you might think. If you want to convert the DMG to a different compressed format (like ISO, which is much like the DMG file format for Windows), a tool like dmg2img will get the job done. But, if you need to get one open, 7-Zip has support for extracting DMGs.

There’s not much reason you’d want to use DMG files in Windows since they usually contain macOS apps and not Windows apps. Next, delete the DMG file itself unless you have a reason for keeping it around. Clicking either one of these opens the DMG file. The DMG mounts in two places: on your desktop and in the Finder sidebar under your hard drive. All you really need to do is double-click the DMG file to open it and mount it to your Mac. Well, luckily macOS does an excellent job of making everything easy. RELATED: Benchmarked: What's the Best File Compression Format? So How Do I Use DMG Files?

Saving your data usage on downloads is always a good thing. And that’s second reason why macOS uses DMG files: they’re a compressed format (like a ZIP file) that makes your download smaller. This little window first goes through a phase of verifying the file, and then once it’s sure the file is good, moves on to decompressing it. This is what you see when the file is opening: DMG files include something called a checksum, which basically verifies that the file is 100% intact.

Let us know if you have other questions about previewing files in Disk Drill.The main reason macOS uses DMG files is to make sure the file downloaded properly and wasn’t tampered with. We recommend using BetterZIP for previewing multiple archives, DMG format and even winmail.dat. However, Quick Look is very flexible and easily expandable by installing plugins. Unfortunately, DMG is not one of them, and for DMG files you would usually get an icon, file name and the size, and not much more until you mount it to your Mac. It does an amazing job of showing you contents of many hundreds of more or less common formats on Macs. As we previously explained, Disk Drill relies on the built-in preview mechanism of macOS, which is Quick Look. However, by default macOS will not show you the contents of a DMG file, which means in Disk Drill Basic there is no sure way to tell if the file can be recovered intact. When you are looking to recover lost data from a Mac, chances are DMG files will be among those you will be expecting to retrieve. Many of us would have a need to recover deleted disk images. When mounted, you would usually see multiple files inside the new volume. When opened or double-clicked, an Apple disk image gets “mounted” as a new volume in Finder. An Apple Disk Image (a file with DMG extension) is a disk image widely used in macOS.

Mac verifying dmg