DVD Backup Freeware

DVD Backup Software is designed so that you can create backup copies of your favourite DVDs, wether it’s a movie DVD or a software DVD. This programs need to exist as some DVDs (specially movie DVDs) are usually copy protected, which means that a simple copy using the disc copying software included with the operating system won’t be enough. DVD publishers add copy protection to their DVDs in order to prevent piracy, however there are times when you may want to have a backup copy of your favourite movies, so if the original becomes damaged or scratched you can still watch your movie over and over again.

So yes, we know that talking about DVD backups can be misleading, as these programs can also be used for DVD piracy, however we want to trust in our readers good faith and willingness to abide by the law.

Some DVD Backup programs will just copy the entire contents of the DVD to your hard drive bypassing any protection placed by the publisher, while others will make a faithful copy to another DVD disc.

One of the freeware DVD backup programs that we love is DVDSmith. DVDSmith is able to remove all copy protections, including CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and ArccOS. It will copy the entire movie all with extras and audio tracks or just the main movie, it’s up to you to select which features are copied. The resulting backup can be played using almost every media player, includng VLC Media Player and Media Player Classic. There are tons of DVD authoring programs like Nero Burning Rom that you can use to burn the resulting backup back to a DVD.

In order to create full DVD to DVD backup copies, we recommend using Any DVD Cloner, which is brought by the same guys that brought you DVDSmith. Any DVD Cloner will create exact replicas of your DVDs and also converts from DVD-9 to DVD-5. It uses the same copy protection bypassing technology found in DVDSmith but instead of saving the backup copy to the hard drive, it allows you to burn it to a DVD-R.

Another nice tool to back up your DVDs and that is open source, is IsoTools. Even though a little bit more difficult to use since it’s command line based, IsoTools is powerful enough to backup almost every DVD and with the libdvdcss libraries, it gets becomes able to skip copy protections.

Please remember that all this information is provided so that you can make backup copies of DVDs that you legally own.