Learn To Save A DVD To The Hard Disk
Most physical media deteriorates over time, and DVDs are no exception. If you wish to be able to watch your precious movie DVDs five or ten years from now, it is a good idea to make a backup copy or two. There are several ways to do this – by copying the disc, or saving the DVD contents to your HD. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility – backing up your discs to the hard disk.
The most straightforward (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 files you find 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 factory-made DVDs.
Another way to back up a disc is to create a “disc image”. This is a single file that contains the entire contents of a disc. The most widespread image file format is ISO, though some backup tools 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 disc 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 video anytime you want, but you also forfeit the menus and you won’t be able to burn 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 nuanced topic that would take a post of it’s own to explain properly.
Well, there you have it – 3 ways to back up your discs to the HD. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.