qcow is a file format for disk image files used by QEMU, a hosted virtual machine monitor. It stands for "QEMU Copy On Write" and uses a disk storage optimization strategy that delays allocation of storage until it is actually needed. Files in qcow format can contain a variety of disk images which are generally associated with specific guest operating systems. Three versions of the format exist: qcow, qcow2 and qcow3 which use the.qcow,.qcow2 and.qcow3 file extensions, respectively. More at Wikipedia