Tutorial: Backing Up Your DVD Collection, Step by Step

There are a number of ways to back up DVD's and I've had various levels of success with trial and error on all of them. The bottom line for me was - how can I make it fairly easy? I already spend money on the original DVD and now I just want a working backup - how can I do this for free? You can read many different suggestions on this subject on the web, and I am not saying that mine is the best. You may love some of the commercial burning software and not mind paying for it, or you may find better success with another program or a set of programs. I'm writing this tutorial based on the way that I still burn my backups and I end up now with a 98% success rate by using tips that I put together from about 25 different sites. If you are ready to start burning, let's jump right in.

Step One: You'll need two free applications for the whole process. DVD Shrink will get the first part done and is an amazing little utility. ImgBurn is the second one and you may be able to find other programs that will do the same, but it's what I use. This utility actually takes care of the burning process after the prep work is done by DVD Shrink.

Step Two: This is one that I ignored at first and you might do just fine by ignoring it too, but I ended up with quite a few coasters (useless DVD's) before I studied up on this a bit. When I started trying to backup my DVDs, my theory was that I would make some mistakes and should therefore go about this on the super-cheap. I bought a couple of low-grade DVDRW's (I use + but this usually isn't a big deal with most modern recorders/players.) I also bought a whole spindle of the cheapest on-sale DVD+R's that I could find. I did indeed make quite a few mistakes while stumbling around with different programs and I'm not really sorry that I had some cheap stuff to play on. The problem was that I couldn't always tell when the problem was due to what I did, and when it was due to the poor media. I also didn't have much luck getting the RW's to play well in my stand-alone DVD player though they did usually play well in my computer. I ended up sticking back to permanent burns on the non-rewritables. After several bad burns, I did some reading on various forums about what brands other people were using. I found many recommendations for Taiyo Yuden blanks from Japan, though you apparently have to watch out for counterfeits. I also found quite a lot of people very happy with Japanese manufactured Verbatim 8X, the Richo brand if using DVD+R versions, and a few people recommended the higher priced Sony blanks. I ordered and tried both Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim 8X and actually had great success with both. So, if you are concerned about good media then this step is to obtain some high or premium quality blanks, and if you are not concerned yet about the media, you'll still obviously need blank recordable DVD's of some kind.

Step Three: Put your movie in your DVD burner and open up DVD Shrink. Windows may prompt you to play the DVD, but unless you aren't sure if the original is any good you can just close that. Now, within DVD Shrink, click on the "Open Disc" icon. By the way, I'm using DVD Shrink version 3.2 so these steps will conform to that version. The program should begin to analyze your disc and this will take a little bit. You can uncheck the box for "Enable video preview" to save resources.

Step Four: When DVD Shrink finished analyzing your movie, you'll have a wonderful view of exactly what is on your DVD. It may be simple or it may be complex. In the left-hand screen you'll probably at least see Main Movie and probably Menus. You may also see things like Extras and Unreferenced Material. At the top of that list you'll see the actual name of the movie (or Untitled) and if that isn't highlighted, go ahead and click there to highlight it. On the right side of the screen, you'll probably see that the Compression Settings are set to "Automatic" and you'll even see a percentage of how much compression will be used. To keep this as simple as possible, the techniques used to burn most current movies for commercial release result in DVD's that have much more material on them than would burn on a regular blank DVD in an uncompressed fashion. DVD Shrink solves this for you by automatically compressing the files to fit on a normal blank. The more stuff on the DVD, the more it has to compress it, so if you have a movie along with a ton of special features and menus, you might see a compression rate of 50% or even lower. If the DVD has little on it, you might see a compression rate of only 80-90% or sometimes no compression is needed. There are many arguments on whether or not compression degrades the quality or functionality of a DVD. I tend to think this might be partly true and if I've had problems with a DVD, I will usually try to eliminate some extras so the compression rate is reduced on the full movie. For the scope of this article, we'll just examine the basics.

Step Five: You may be ready right now to create your backup as it is. If you want to try to preserve everything on the DVD, you can just move on to Step Nine as the next few steps have to do with manipulating the results. If you know you don't need some of the extras or if you really want to reduce the compression rate, go ahead and take a closer look at the available options. Click on the Menus selection on the left (if it is present) and now you'll see some options on the right. You can do some things here to reduce the size. If the menus are animated, you can make change that, for example. With Menus selected, click in the dropdown box on the right where it probably says Automatic. You can choose Still Image or Still Pictures and this will reduce the size of what needs to be burned. You'll also actually see a graphic example of the still image vs. the still pictures so you have an idea what you are doing to your DVD.

Step Six: Now move your cursor to the Main Movie on the left and select it. On the right you are now likely to see a list of languages that are available for Audio and Subpicture (Subtitles.) In many cases, there will be more languages taking up more space than you really need. You can uncheck those you do not need and you will see the compression percentage rate change accordingly. I often take out all the languages except for English, but other times I like to leave them all available.

Step Seven: Move your cursor to the Extras if it exists and see if there is anything you can eliminate. Languages are again often a possibility.

Step Eight: Move to the Unreferenced Material and/or other remaining sections. You can cut out most all of this by changing the right-hand drop down box from Automatic to Stills or you can just choose to cut out languages that you do not need.

Step Nine: If you've made any changes that you want, you are now ready to actually burn. Now select the icon for Backup. The left tab is for Target Device and this is important if you want to follow this tutorial exactly all the way to a finished backup DVD. You will have the option here to choose ISO Image file for your Backup Target. For the purposes of this tutorial, you'll want to choose ISO Image file. For Target Image File you can browse to a location that you want to store your temporary ISO. In general, I would leave the name of the image file at it's default, but it is fine to browse to a specific location to store it. Note that DVD Shrink will tell you here how much space the ISO file will take up and how much you have available. You do need a fair amount of space to store these files, especially if you plan to keep them. (You can always delete them after you have a working DVD, however.)

Step Ten: In general, you don't need to make any changes in the other tabs here such as DVD Region and so on. Leave these at default unless you have a clear reason to make changes. Then click OK. DVD Shrink will now begin the process of writing from your DVD to the new ISO file on your hard drive. This can take a short time or a long time depending on many factors including the size of the DVD you are burning from, how much RAM and CPU power you have, etc.

Step Eleven: When the ISO file is complete, you have a file that is ready to burn to a blank DVD. Now, open the other program I mentioned which is called ImgBurn. This part is a snap! Put your blank DVD in your DVD burner and at the bottom of the ImgBurn window you should see that it is ready for burning. If it says "Disc Not Empty" instead, check to make sure you didn't leave the original DVD in or put in a corrupt or used blank DVD.

Step Twelve: At the top of the ImgBurn utility you will see a place to select the Source. Click on the folder to browse and locate the ISO file that you just made with DVD Shrink. ImgBurn will fill in the blanks now for things like Label and Size and whatever else it can determine. Make sure that the Destination drop down box has the right drive letter in it for your DVD burner.

Step Thirteen: On the lower right you will see Settings for number of Copies and Write Speed. This is where you may have to make a slight judgment call. Some people say that the slower the burn, the better the quality. The one thing I'd recommend for sure is not setting this number higher than is recommended by your player and your blank DVD. If your DVD is a Verbatim 8X and your player is an 16X read and 8X write player- you don't want to choose anything higher than 8X here. Personally, I have had better luck with DVDs that run fine and don't skip if I burn them slowly. I set the Write Speed to 1 or 2X, but I'm also a Sunday driver so you can throw caution to the wind here if you want to be wild.

Step Fourteen: By now the icons at the bottom showing a hard drive and a DVD should be lit up which indicates you are ready to go. If they are grayed out, make sure that you really have a blank DVD in the burner, that the burner is chosen under Destination, and that you've chosen a valid ISO as a source file.

Step Fifteen: BURN! Click on the icons in the lower left and your ISO will begin to write to your blank DVD. If all goes well, you will shortly have a beautiful and highly playable DVD. Mine usually play great in my computer, the stand-alone DVD player on my TV and my Playstation2. For whatever reason, if I do have a problem with playback, the computer seems to play them better than the stand-alone methods. If your burn does go well, test your new DVD and make sure that it plays back okay. If so, you can delete that ISO file to make more room on your computer unless you think you might want to make additional copies from it.

I hope this helps you in your quest to come up with playable movies - it is a distillation of many tests and trials that I went through in the quest to come up with something that would work for me most of the time.