Most physical media gets damaged with time, and DVDs are no different. If you want to be able to watch your prized video DVDs in the next decade, it is a good idea to make 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 discs to the HD.
The simplest (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 find to a suitable location on your HD. 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 DVD is to create a “disc image”. This is a single file that contains all the data of a disc. The most popular disc image 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 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 disc emulator to mount it.
Finally, there is another way to back up a disc - DVD ripping. Basically, you use software like “Any DVD Converter” and it generates video file(s) from your DVD(s). This way you can easily view the video whenever 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 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 - three simple ways to back up your discs to the HD. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.
