As you all know DVD’s might get corrupted over time. Scratches, carelessness or any other reason can make your favourite movie inaccessible. So how do you go about creating a backup to save you the grief (and the money) of buying a new one?

Most new movies are protected in some way, which makes it impossible to perform a standard file copy as you would do with your personal stuff. However there’s numerous tools (applications) on the net that can fix this for you, even without you having to be a data scientist. Actually it is easier than one would think.

1. To remove the copy protection I recommend using AnyDVD.

“AnyDVD works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it’s inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software.

AnyDVD is capable of removing unwanted movie features, including subtitles and prohibition messages such as copyright and FBI warnings. It also allows you to launch an external application whenever you insert or remove a disc, or prevent ‘PC-friendly’ software from automatically launching when you insert a video DVD.

Decryption is not all that AnyDVD offers. You can control the drive speed of your DVD drive, allowing you to reduce the noise level when watching movies on your PC. You can even adjust the display frequency of your monitor for both NTSC and PAL displays.

But AnyDVD doesn’t just stop at DVDs. It also decrypts protected audio CDs to allow you to copy them.”

2. To perform the actual copying I recommend using DVDShrink.

“DVD Shrink is software to backup DVD discs. You can use this software in conjunction with DVD burning software of your choice, to make a backup copy of any DVD video disc.”

3. Burn your backup to a blank DVD using “whatever”.
Burn your backups using your favourite DVD/CD burning software, just make sure it supports burning the disc as a movie DVD, otherwise you’ll not be able to play it on your regular DVD player.

That’s it! You should now be able to create backups of all your movies without much trouble.

Note! This article is meant to illustrate how to create backups of movies that you actually own (paid for), and is not your average guide to illegal copying.