It is easy to copy DVDs. What is more, thanks to special DVD burning software, now you can copy even system files to DVD. For many people it is still not clear how you can achieve this under Windows XP. If you are among them, here are some tips, which will help you.

First you need to insert the DVD into the DVD drive. If your drive is older and it is a CD-ROM, the procedure won�t work. After the DVD is inserted, use the standard copy/paste command to copy the necessary files into the folder where you want them to be. As a result, you will see many files. Look at their size because chances are that the largest files are the movie files, while all the rest are just supporting files.

After you have copied the contents of the DVD onto your hard drive, you need a DVD ripper program. DVD ripper programs can convert formats such as VCD to DVD, rlv to mp3, mp4, VLC, etc. DVD rippers can be free and paid but even the paid programs often offer a free trial version, which you can use for some time and see if it works for you.

Before you copy the DVD to a hard disk, you need to check if there is enough free space on the hard disk. A standard DVD is 8GB, so you need at least 10GB free hard disk space for it. The extra free space is a requirement of the operating system because it creates a buffer there. It is very important that before you start copying, you close all other programs. The reason is that if you run any programs, while copying the files from the DVD to the hard disk, the data might not be copied correctly.

Now a day�s rewritable DVDs are also available, which can be written and erased several hundred times. We can use these rewriteable DVDs to record data that needs to be re-written more than once, such as updates of official records. If you have adequate knowledge of how to copy DVDs, you will realize there is no difference in recording the two, except that the re-writeable version tends to be a bit slower.

We can also copy files from hard disk to DVDs. The hard disk drives are prone to crashes, virus attacks etc and suddenly we can lose all our important data. It is necessary that we make a backup of those important files. To make backups of such important files we can copy or store those files on a DVD. Burning and storing data on a DVD requires need a DVD burning software like Nero (latest version Nero7) or Roxio that is compatible with Windows XP. This type of software is very user friendly, and you can click along to copy from Hard Drive to a DVD, or from a DVD to a hard drive using Windows XP.