aimage (the advanced imager) is an imaging tool which is part of AFF, the Advanced Forensic Format. aimage can create files in raw, AFF, AFD, or AFM formats. AFF and AFD formats can be compressed or uncompressed. aimage can optionally compress and calculate MD5 or SHA-1 hash residues while the data is being copied. It has intelligent error recovery, similar to what is in ddrescue.