How To Back Up A DVD To The HD
Most physical storage deteriorates with time, and DVDs are no exception. If you wish to be able to re-watch your precious movie discs five or ten years from now, it is a good idea to create a backup copy or two. You can do this either by copying the disc, or saving it’s contents to your HDD. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility – backing up your DVDs to the hard drive.
The simplest (and least likely to work) technique to back up a movie disc is to just copy the files normally – right click the drive and select “Explore” to avoid the auto-play, then drag & drop any folders you find to somewhere on your HDD. 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 the entire contents of a disc. The most widespread disc image format is ISO, though some backup tools may also use a MDF file type or other proprietary file types. To create a disc image you could use e.g. ISOBuster or MagicISO. To view the disc’s contents later, you will need to burn the image file to a blank DVD or use a virtual drive to mount it.
Finally, there is another way to back up a DVD – DVD ripping. Basically, you run an application like “Any DVD Converter” and it generates video file(s) from your disc(s). This way you can handily view the movie anytime you want, but you also lose the menus and you won’t be able to make an exact copy of the disc if the original gets damaged or is lost. Anyway, I won’t discuss this in detail here – this is a nuanced topic that would take an article of it’s own to describe.
Well, there you have it – three simple ways to back up your DVDs to the hard drive. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.
