How to backup your DVDs
5 September 2007
I have an office-style chair next to my desk, it has five little wheels at the bottom. I was sitting in it today and heard a gentle crunch noise coming from somewhere. It turned out that I had accidentally ran over a DVD and cracked it.
I had recently bought a small pile of new DVDs, and they were sitting on my desk in their shrink-wrap. The cracked DVD made me decide to keep backups, so I started with them. I am using the dvdbackup utility. The idea is not to rip the DVD to a MPEG or whatever but to backup the whole DVD to disk, the resulting files can be burned back to a new DVD with mkisofs if I get another broken DVD.
Of course, there is nothing stopping you from playing the resulting files from the hard-drive, but ripping it to a single file in a lossy format would be a far more efficient way of creating files for the software player, you would end up with a file as a few hundred of MB, rather than 7 GB. However, if you want to keep the subtitles and so on, and I do as these are mostly foreign language films, then this is one approach to take.
1. Get dvdbackup
On Gentoo you can use:
``emerge dvdbackup ``
On Debain/Ubuntu, you can use Synaptic or use:
``apt-get install dvdbackup ``
2. Backup DVD
Now we mant to backup the whole DVD to the current directory:
dvdbackup -M -i /dev/dvd -o ./
-M means that we want to backup the whole DVD, -i specifies the input directory, while -o specifies the output directory.
If you want to give the backup a specific title, then use the -n to specify the title.
Conclusion
That's it really, dvdbackup has a lot more options to give a greater level of control, for example you might just want certain chapters, but this is far enough for me! Read the manpage for more details on those more advanced options.
The cost of storage this way is relatively expensive of course. I did some quick calculations and we can say that hard drive storage currently costs five times more than DVD storage (you also need free hard drive ports). We may be able to claw back some of the difference through compressing the backups, after all the idea is that you do not need them that often.
So that was my approach, how do you backup your DVDs?
1 Ivo Emanuel Goncalves says...
> So that was my approach, how do you backup your DVDs?
Well, K3B does that for me. Since it does a lot of other things too, it's a nifty tool, and I like to have it around.
Posted at 12:45 a.m. on September 5, 2007
2 Christer Edwards says...
I have tried k3b, k9copy and dvd::rip and none of them have every worked for me. I have a large collection I would like to backup but each of these programs b0rks when I try to use them. If anyone has any tips, links to good tutorials, etc please find me on my blog link and let me know.
Posted at 3:10 a.m. on September 5, 2007
3 numerodix says...
> So that was my approach, how do you backup your DVDs?
I call it undvd: http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/index.php/2007/01/30/undvd-dvd-ripping- made-easy/
Posted at 8:30 a.m. on September 5, 2007
4 kerry walper says...
I have used k3b. It is one of the best. If you have libdvdcss2 as well as Dvdauthor, dvdbackup, dvdrip, dvdrtools, dvd+rw-tools, k9copy, lame, lame- extras, libavifile-0.7c2, libdvdnav4, libdvdplay0, libdvdread3, libmad0, libxine-extracodecs, mencoder, qdvdauthor, transcode and vamps then k3b can pretty much do it all on it's own. K3b has taken a 7 gb dvd and put it on a regular dvd blank of around 4 gb. The quality was great. Just choose force when it asks for a dual layer blank. Other than that a really good little dvd back up tool is Shrinkta. I use MEPIS but these are available for debian in general I'm sure.
Posted at 8:31 p.m. on March 23, 2008