How do I archive movies?

There are many ways to do it, but what you need to worry about is encryption.  Movie studios place encryption protection on their movies to prevent you from copying them.  But, from everything I've read you are able to make a backup copy of your movie legally.

What do I need?
First, you will need a fatty hard drive to hold all of your movies.  I recommend 1 terabyte or more.  You'll need a DVD drive obviously.  You will also need software in most cases.

Why should I do this?
Well, if you have kids you can look at the state you DVDs may be in and cringe.  I have found it is best to store you movies on a computer where the kids can't scratch them, step on them, or break them.  If you have an Xbox, or media center PC you can play these movies directly from you computer onto you TV.  You would also want to do this because keeping a library of DVDs does not look that great in the front room.  If you have them all stored away it's more convenient to get to them, and less time consuming searching for them.

I recommend using DVDshrink for you free option.  The paid option I recommend using is a combination of two different software: CloneDVD and AnyDVD.  They both have an evaluation period of 21 days, but that should be long enough to archive your complete library of movies.  AnyDVD is a way of decrypting those protected DVDs you have so that CloneDVD can copy them.  DVDshrink may also need to have a DVD decrypted, and it is recommended that you use software called DVDdecryptor.

Here is a video tutorial on how to copy a DVD with CloneDVD:



Now, if you want to go the free route you can use DVDshrink, and here is a video tutorial on how to use it:



DvDshrink is not the only free option out there.  If you do a simple Google search you'll be able to find others.  I just like to use it.  I find it's fast and as long as the disk isn't encrypted it does a good job.

Need some great utilities?

I found some great free tools that you can use to help you in a variety of ways.  Head over to www.easeus.com for tools like:

• Data Recovery Wizard
• Partition Master
• Todo Backup

Data Recovery Wizard allows you to recover 1 GB of data. You can recover files emptied from Recycle Bin, or lost due to software crash, formatted or damaged hard drive, virus attack, lost partition and other unknown reasons under Windows 2000 and higher. It recovers data from formatted partitions with original file names and storage paths. Moreover, the free data recovery software works well with dynamic disk, RAID and EXT2/EXT3 file system..

Partition Master is a cornucopia of goodness with many capabilities. Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partitions, manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on your Master Boot Record under Windows 2000 and higher. The most popular hard disk management functions are brought together with powerful data protection including: Partition Manager, Disk & Partition Copy Wizard & Partition Recovery Wizard. Copy Wizard to copy partition or migrate entire hard disk to another without Windows system re-installation.

Are your system, photos, music and financial data protected?  Todo Backup, supporting Windows 2000 and higher, and Windows Server 2000 and higher, is a potent free backup software that can perform system backups and restore, hard disk or partition backup and restore, disk clone to protect your system and disk. It backs up your whole PC, including the operating system plus your data, applications, settings and everything!  This is called a disk image.  Todo Backup is useful if you want to replace the older smaller hard disk by a newer larger hard disk or migrate/upgrade to Windows 7 without reinstalling the operating system and applications once again.

I always suggest that after you do a clean install of your operating system, drivers, and programs then take an image of your machine.  This way if anything bad happens, you will save yourself a ton of time putting your system back together.

I hope you find these tools as useful as I do.