How To Back Up A DVD To The HD
Most physical media deteriorates over time, and DVDs are no exception. If you wish to be able to re-watch your precious video discs in the next decade, it would be prudent to create a backup copy or two. You can do this either by copying the disc, 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 most straightforward (and least likely to work) way to back up a video DVD is to just copy the files normally - right click the drive and select “Explore” to avoid the autoplay, then drag & drop any folders you see to a suitable location on your hard disk. This usually works fine with personal DVDs 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 widespread disc image format is ISO, though some backup tools may also store it as a UIF file format or other proprietary file formats. To create a disc image you can use e.g. ISOBuster or MagicISO. To view the DVD’s contents later, you will need to burn the image file to a blank disc or use a virtual drive to mount it.
Finally, there is another way to back up a disc - DVD ripping. Basically, you run an application like “Any DVD Converter” and it creates video file(s) from your disc(s). This way you can easily view the video anytime you want, but you also lose the menus and you won’t be able to make an exact copy of the DVD if the original becomes unreadable or is lost. Anyway, I won’t discuss this in 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 DVDs to the hard disk. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.
Sphere: Related Content