DVD Backup Storage

I was advised by a friend to backup all of my dvd movies. The reason was that I had paid a price for the dvd, and if it got scratched or became unusable, I would lose my investment in that movie. It seemed like a good idea to me, so I decided to pursue my options.

The options I have are to backup the dvd to a hard drive or to create a copy of the dvd itself. I chose dvd backup software that would do either one for me. I finally decided that my main plan was to backup all of my dvd’s to a hard drive, because I was going to set up a media player on my downstairs television to stream the movies whenever I wanted to watch them. So now I must choose a dvd copier that is right for me.

There are various types of dvd backup software on the internet. There is software that will do a lot of different things so it is important to choose the correct software. In my case, I first tried the freeware that was on the internet. The best product I found was DVD Shrink 3.2. It is very simple to use, and decrypted and backed up my dvd movies very easily. I did have problems with some of the protection on a few disks. I then tried the trial version of AnyDVD (21 Days free trial). This dvd backup software worked very well on the few disks I could not backup to my hard drive. It has many useful utilities which an advanced user would be able to do a lot of creative things like extracting audio tracts. DVD Decrypter is another freeware program that I am working with. It is easy to use, but gets into far too much detail for me. DVD Fab is another software ($50 range), and there is also a DVD Fab for Blue Ray DVD ($60 range). These products can be purchased together for about $80. This dvd backup software includes the ability to remove all protections and copy to a file on your hard drive, or rip a new DVD. This software gives you a 30 day free trial, but I never needed to use it. There is other software out there on the internet, but these products completed my task so far.  You can experiment with these and other software to find out which one will fulfill your needs as far as dvd duplication on your hard drive, or dvd replication on another disk.

I had so many movies and pictures on my hard drive that my computer was a snail. I purchased some external hard drives to house my movies and pictures and freed up a lot of space on my internal hard drive. The movies transferred easily, and all is well.

I networked my computer with a digital media player (see "digital media player guide"), and can now stream movies from my computer upstairs to my television downstairs. Also, I can stream the pictures from my computer downstairs.

Now I am told that I should have backup storage for my backup. This would mean adding more hard drives. I haven’t done this yet, but it seems like a good idea for another day.