How to burn, copy, and backup a CD, DVD, or HD DVD for free

Posted on August 8, 2007 at 8:24 pm

As a technology enthusiast, I often get asked how can someone easily burn or copy CDs, DVDs, or HD DVD’s for free. Most people have heard of software like Roxio, Sonic, or Nero, but none of them are free and they are usually so bloated with extras that your computer actually starts to run a lot slower after you install them! Luckily, I spend lots of time trying to find free tools and utilities that do the same thing, but without all the crap.

One really easy to use, full-featured, and non-resource intensive program that I use to burn CDs and DVDs is ImgBurn. ImgBurn has several “modes” that makes it very user-friendly: Read, Build, Write, Verify, and Discovery.

In Read mode, you can put a disc into your CD/DVD drive and copy the disk to an image file on your computer. This is a great way to backup any software cds that you might have laying around, like your Windows Operating System CD, Microsoft Office CDs, or other important software. If you ever lose those discs, it’s not a big deal because you can simply use ImgBurn in Write mode to burn the image back to a new CD/DVD. The great thing about ImgBurn is that it even supports HD DVD’s!

As you can see from the graphic, I’m currently in Read mode. You can change modes by clicking on Mode from the top menu. I placed a DVD movie into my drive and ImgBurn automatically chooses the destination based on which drive has the most free hard drive space and the file type, in this case ISO. To begin copying, click on the image of the CD with the green arrow at the bottom.

Once you have the image file saved on your computer, you can burn as many copies of it as you like by going to Write mode. Here you choose the image file, whether you want to verify after burning, and the number of copies. Some of the advanced features are the fact that ImgBurn supports Unicode file and folder names, so you will have no problems with international character sets or long file names.

ImgBurn also supports a number of image formats other than ISO that it can burn including BIN, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, MDS, NRG, and PDI. ImgBurn also supports dual layer DVDs jobs.

So you might be wondering now “Well I can convert my cd and dvds into images for backup and I can burn images, but what if I simply want to burn some files off my computer?” That’s when you would go to Build mode. Build mode lets you simply choose files and folders off your computer to be written to disc. In order to add files or folders, use the little button below the green + sign. Pop in a CD or DVD and click on the convert image at the bottom left.

ImgBurn also has a lot of advanced options for those who wish to more than the basics, but otherwise it’s ready to use right out of the box. It runs on Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista (including all the 64-bit versions).

Convenient, light-weight and easy to use, so check it out if you’re sick of Roxio, Sonic and Nero always crashing or eating up resources.

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» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

10 Responses to “How to burn, copy, and backup a CD, DVD, or HD DVD for free”

robert said on : May 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am

how can i burn a program off laptop to cd?

Ron said on : August 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am

Howdy,

I really appreciated your bit on “Imgburn”. It’s a great help.

I need some FREE software that easily rips DVDs into MPEG2.

The AVS4you is not free anymore, and the so called free trial puts crap on the screen of your ripped video. Do you know of any thing free that doesn’t put this crap on the screen?

Leti said on : August 14th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

does this free software allow you to copy copyright dvd’s?

Caren Mikota said on : August 17th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

DVD movie burning software. I recently wanted a good DVD movie burning software and found that there is a lot out there at a pretty good price and most do not have the decrypter to unlock the Hollywood movies, which becomes another problem finding one that works with the software you just purchased. After a few tries I found 2 software’s that go with each other. Burn a great movies with all the extras and both are absolutely free software’s for download. It was this site that helped me the most but you didn’t tie these softwares together for me so I thought I would for future readers and tried to make it simple for us who are not IT people.

DVD Shrink 3.2 creates a ISO file for you that you burn in ImgBurn.

DVD Shrink 3.2. Put you DVD in your DVD burner. In DVD Shrink select “open disk” and select the dvd drive you are using and highlight your movie. Then select the icon at the top that says “Backup”. You have the option to delete extras here and you will notice at the top of the screen the green line lets you know if your movie will fit on one DVD. For the most part the defaults are OK (Note there are additional options for larger DVD’s and dual layer DVD’s).
First question note that most of your movies are from the US. Under” Select backup target” use the drop down box and select “ISO Image File”. Set your target folder to one you can find when you go to burn the DVD in ImgBurn. Select “OK” and you are off copying your movie that is decrypted and ready to go for burning. This also works with many DVD buring softwares that you may already have.

But….if you don’t have one…..use ImgBurn a completely free software for download.

ImgBurn. Select “Write Image file to disc” and the software opens up. (There are a number of additional options but the defaults is a good starting point for new users) Under Source select your movie from the target folder where you had DVD Shrink put it. This should be a ISO file as you requested in DVD Shrink. Highlight it and select open. Under destination you should have your DVD writer selected. If you don’t want to go through the test mode or verify just unselect these and click on the green arrow below.

DONE. Now it is just a matter of time and you have your movie copied and ready to go to you DVD player.

Woody Walters said on : December 14th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

How do I tie mulitple video files together for burning to a CD or DVD? If I simply add them one at a time it will burn them separately but only play them back one at a time instead of consecutively without prompting.

akishore said on : December 15th, 2008 at 12:04 am

@Woody – If you type “merge video files” or “combine video files” in Google, there are lots of programs out there that can help you do this.

dakota turner said on : March 24th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

hey i need help. i need to burn a music video for a project at school and i dont know how to do it. could you help me?

Phil said on : August 21st, 2009 at 11:01 pm

What did I do wrong? I copied doc files to a CD. The CD shows the 100MB is used. But I can’t find anything on the CD. The Index is blank. How do I fix this and recover doc files? Thank you.

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