IPF stands for Interchangeable Preservation Format, and is the file format we use to preserve content, that is, floppy disk images. It’s naming is quite abstract for very good reasons:
It is platform agnostic.
It is low-level, representing the information as it would have been read by a drive head.
It is not just for disks: Any type of digital media can be contained by the format. Currently it is used for disk images and ROM files, but in the future it may possibly be used for CDROMs and information contained in hardware “dongle” protections.
The underlying file format has many similarities to the IFF (Interchangeable File Format) standard on the Amiga, which was a very forward-thinking format. The same techniques are used today in other file formats such as
PNG.