Windows 7: .Bin/.Cue vs. .Iso

I found a 2GB flash drive in Walmart's parking lot. I took a look at it this morning & on it are 3 files: .Bin, .Cue & .Iso; both images are of the same collection.

I mounted both image files on separate virtual drives & compared each file side by side. All files have the same dates & are of the same size.

Complete sizes of each image file are:
.Bin & .Cue: 801 MB (840,675,434 bytes)
.Iso: 698 MB (732,016,640 bytes)

Is there any reason I should keep one over the other?

In my opinion, the .bin and & .cue are an older way of creating disc images. The .iso format is more common, and accomplishes the same goal within one file.

If you've decided not to try to get the drive back to its original owner, then just wipe it.

For future reference, ISO is a standard supported by most if not all contemporary OSes / Burner software.

You can rename a .bin file to .iso and it will work in many cases. Not always, though.

difference between iso and nrg bin cue mdf etc is that iso does not backup the whole disc, I mean. if you have a disc where a game is burned and CD MUSIC, then in iso only the game will be backed up but if you use bin you can also backup the CD tracks. (I mean not mp3 but those audio cd files)

ABSOLUTELY not true. ISO copies every single bit of data on the disk. Where did you get a crazy idea like that? It's a disk IMAGE, meaning the entire disk.

What game is it? Looks like an old 1CD release?

Not sure if the owner could be found since Walmart shares the parking lot w/other stores; but I did drop off the flash drive to Walmart customer service just in case someone goes there looking for it. I'd hate it if I lost a flash drive! I did copy the image files though, hey, I found the drive

I did do a test of installing, playing & uninstalling each image at separate times & both work identically. So I'm probably keeping the .iso since it's smaller & just 1 file.

absolutely true, try ripping the game 'Dark Reign 2' to iso and nrg, you will notice that the game music is gone on the iso format, iso format can store only 1 data track/stream, real cd's can have more and there comes bin/mdf/nrg , they can make real copies of cd's including the anti cd copy protection, ISO CANNOT!

There used to be a free file called "bin2iso".

Google gives this site for the download.

Bin2iso | Actual Download | WinBin2Iso

It is free and when I was running WinXP it used it often and it worked great.