Learn To Back Up A DVD To Your HD
All physical storage deteriorates over time, and DVDs are no different. If you wish to be able to re-watch your precious movie discs five or ten years from now, it would be prudent to create a backup copy or two. You can do this either by copying the DVD, or saving the raw data to your hard disk. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility - backing up your discs to the hard drive.
The simplest (and least likely to work) way to back up a movie disc is to just copy the files normally - right click the disc drive and select “Explore” to avoid the autoplay, then copy any folders you find to somewhere on your hard drive. This usually works fine with personal discs like the recording of you marriage or some such, but not with protected DVDs.
Another way to back up a DVD is to create a “disc image”. A disc image is a single file that contains all the data of a disc. The most popular image file format is ISO, though some backup tools may also use a .uif file or other proprietary file formats. To create a disc image you could use e.g. ISOBuster or MagicISO. To access the disc’s contents later, you will need to burn the image file to a blank DVD or use a disc emulator to mount it.
Finally, there is another way to back up a DVD - DVD ripping. In essence, you run an application like “Any DVD Converter” and it generates video file(s) from your DVD(s). This way you can easily view the movie anytime you want, but you also lose the menus and you won’t be able to burn an exact copy of the disc if the original becomes unreadable or is lost. Anyway, I won’t go into detail here - this is a complex topic that would take an article of it’s own to explain properly.
Well, there you have it - 3 simple ways to back up your discs to the HDD. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.