Learn To Copy A DVD To Your Hard Disk
All physical media gets damaged with time, and DVDs are no exception. If you want to be able to re-watch your prized movie discs five or ten years from now, it would be prudent to make a backup copy or two. There are several ways to do this - by copying the DVD, or saving it’s contents to your hard drive. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility - backing up your DVDs to the hard disk.
The simplest (and least likely to work) technique to back up a video disc is to just copy the files normally - right click the drive and select “Explore” to avoid the autoplay window popping up, then copy any folders you find to a suitable location on your hard drive. This usually works fine with personal DVDs like the recording of you marriage or some such, but not with factory-made DVDs.
Another way to back up a disc 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 applications may also store it as a .uif file or other proprietary file types. To create a disc image you could use, for example, ISOBuster or MagicISO. To access the DVD’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 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 handily view the video 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 gets damaged or is lost. Anyway, I won’t discuss this in detail here - this is a nuanced topic that would take a post of it’s own to describe.
Well, there you have it - 3 simple ways to back up your discs to the hard disk. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.