All physical media deteriorates with time, and DVDs are no different. If you want to be able to re-watch your precious video discs in the next decade, it is a good idea to create a backup copy or two. There are several ways to do this - by copying the disc, or saving it’s contents to your hard drive. In this post I’ll discuss the second possibility - backing up your DVDs to the HDD.

The simplest (and least likely to work) way to back up a video disc is to just copy the files normally - right click the drive and select “Explore” to avoid the auto-play, then copy any files you see 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 protected 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 MDF file type or other proprietary file types. To create a disc image you could use e.g. ISOBuster or MagicISO. To access the disc’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 DVD(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 disc if the original becomes unreadable or is lost. Anyway, I won’t go into detail here - this is a complex topic that would take a post of it’s own to explain properly.

Well, there you have it - 3 simple ways to back up your DVDs to the hard drive. Hopefully you’ve found this post useful.