How To Back Up A DVD To The HD
Most physical media gets damaged over time, and DVDs are no different. If you want to be able to re-watch your precious video DVDs 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 the DVD contents to your HD. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility - backing up your DVDs to the HD.
The simplest (and least likely to work) way to back up a video disc is to just copy the files normally - right click the disc 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 discs 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 the entire contents of a disc. The most popular image file format is ISO, though some applications may also use a UIF file type or other proprietary file formats. To create a disc image you can use e.g. ISOBuster or MagicISO. To access the DVD’s contents later, you will need to burn the image file to a blank disc or use a disc emulator 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 whenever you want, but you also forfeit 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 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 - three ways to back up your DVDs to the hard disk. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.
