Question How to back up a DVD?

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axlrose

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We were able to buy A copy of our school musical. It is EXTREMELY important to my daughter. We just have the one copy so we are afraid to use it, or let my parents borrow it etc. I haven't had an optical drive on my PC in years and have gotten rid of my old media discs. Is there any legal way to make a back up copy of the DVD? Can I do anything with my PC SSD? A thumb drive? Can anyone else copy it for me?

Thanks.
 
Certain commercial services will do it for a fee. Possible legalities unknown.

No doubt you can do it yourself....likely with free software. If you are willing to climb a learning curve. You might be able to get it onto your PC in the form of a VOB file.

I can't help further than that.
 
axlrose said:
We were able ------to buy A copy------- of our school musical. It is EXTREMELY important to my daughter. We just have the one copy
Click to expand...
Being as you have legal copy of the DVD you have the right to make a backup copy of it for your own personal use.

But you have ditched all the tools you need to make this happen. You at least need a PC DVD drive and a program to rip the disk.

There are legal programs that you can do this with but I don't want to cross any forum rules on the subject and publicly list.

But it can be done.
 
axlrose said:
We were able to buy A copy of our school musical. It is EXTREMELY important to my daughter. We just have the one copy so we are afraid to use it, or let my parents borrow it etc. I haven't had an optical drive on my PC in years and have gotten rid of my old media discs. Is there any legal way to make a back up copy of the DVD? Can I do anything with my PC SSD? A thumb drive? Can anyone else copy it for me?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
I have found this company's products are reliable:

https://www.lg.com/us/burners-drives/lg-sp80nb80-slim-external-dvd-drive

Ultra-Slim Portable DVD Burner & Drive - GP65NS60 | LG USA

Discover the Ultra-Slim Portable DVD Burner & Drive that features M-DISC™ Support and Silent Play. Find reviews, specs, and more for GP65NS60.
www.lg.com www.lg.com
 
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Addendum to above. I falsely remembered it being able to burn as well, it appears not. I haven't used it in now probably a decade or more. Maybe the no burning was for legal reasons.

To burn the image it creates, this tool is as basic as it gets as well. Also withstood the test of time and I still use it today when I made my own ISO from files.

The Official ImgBurn Website

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit... and it's free!
www.imgburn.com
https://m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/imgburn.html
 
These look like good options. Thank you. Basic how to...I feel like back in the day I needed two optical drives to burn a disc. Can I make this work with one drive now? Do I copy media to my SSD to burn it what? Thanks.
 
axlrose said:
These look like good options. Thank you. Basic how to...I feel like back in the day I needed two optical drives to burn a disc. Can I make this work with one drive now? Do I copy media to my SSD to burn it what? Thanks.
Click to expand...

When the smoke clears, what do you want to end up with:

1; a second DVD that is a replica of the first. Viewable only with a DVD drive.

or

2; a file on your hard drive that can be played within Windows itself, like any other video file, without any DVD drive at all.

or

3; both or neither or something else entirely.
 
axlrose said:
These look like good options. Thank you. Basic how to...I feel like back in the day I needed two optical drives to burn a disc. Can I make this work with one drive now? Do I copy media to my SSD to burn it what? Thanks.
Click to expand...
As above, you want to create an ISO file, which is basically an image of the DVD. You store that on your hard drive, and then it gets backed up with all the rest of your data, which you should be backing up regularly. Stick another copy in any cloud storage you have for good measure.

That ISO (and its copies) is then your guarantee against losing the video that's important to your daughter. You can copy it to additional DVDs to use or just use the original.
 
Any way to figure out the size of the disc the play is recorded on? It's a long play with an intermission, and buying a pack of discs that doesn't have enough space doesn't make good sense. 😊
 
If I remember correctly some copying software, once the initial target disk/CD/DVD was full, would prompt the user to insert a second disk.

I believe that that option needed to be pre-configured or othewise selected before starting the copy.

Otherwise a "disk full" error would occur.

Another thought to add: If there is only one original copy find some other expendable DVD to practice with....
 
Ralston18 said:
If I remember correctly some copying software, once the initial target disk/CD/DVD was full, would prompt the user to insert a second disk.

I believe that that option needed to be pre-configured or othewise selected before starting the copy.

Otherwise a "disk full" error would occur.

Another thought to add: If there is only one original copy find some other expendable DVD to practice with....
Click to expand...
Yes.

But given a school musical on a DVD, it is almost certainly a standard single (4.7GB) or dual layer (8.5GB) size.

This is for wide dissemination to all the parents. Most of which are absolutely clueless in the tech arena.
Regular DVDs will work.
 
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axlrose said:
Any way to figure out the size of the disc the play is recorded on? It's a long play with an intermission, and buying a pack of discs that doesn't have enough space doesn't make good sense. 😊
Click to expand...
Record the ISO to hard disk first. And then back up that ISO (you have some form of back up for all your data?)

Once you've done that you can figure about getting it onto other discs. You'll be able to see the size of the ISO directly.
 
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