Backup your entire Blogger blog in under 2 minutes

For my next party trick I'm going to show you how to perform an entire backup of your Blogspot (aka Google's Blogger) blog in three idiot-proof steps.

This technique requires no software other than a web browser so you can put your offline site sucking tools back in their box. Neither will any template modifications or configuration alterations be necessary. Your backup will consist of a single html page containing every entry ever published in sequential order, a handful of miscellaneous CSS files, plus any images you have posted, no matter where they are hosted.

Should disaster strike you won't be able to use your backup to instantly restore you.blogspot.com as you might with an automated import script, but likewise this would be the case if you instead chose to follow Google's tortuous advice (link now dead and not saved by archive.org), or employed an offline browser (which I should point out would save multiple copies of the same posts in addition to all kinds of superfluous fluff).
Here's the procedure...

1. Scroll downwards through the list of dates in your 'blog archive' sidebar until you reach the year in which you began posting and click on the link.
The URL - minus the spaces which have been inserted to trigger word wrapping - in your address bar will look a lot like this:

http://kookosity.blogspot.com/ search?updated-min= 1999-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max= 2000-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=13

2. The URL in this example instructs Blogger to display all the posts created between the first day of 1999 and the first day of 2000, though if you extend the 'updated-max' date to reflect the date of your most recent post (or just set it way ahead into the future) and boost the 'max-results' limit to include all your entries you can force Blogger to cram everything onto one page.

3. Make your adjustments, press return and then save the output in "web page, complete" format (if you're using Firefox) to a safe place on your hard drive.

The result will look identical to its online counterpart so can easily be absorbed by the naked-eye (as opposed to an RSS interpreter for example). Beats pulling rabbits out of a top hat, eh.

Read More

Use your Gmail account as a backup drive

With the storage space available to Gmail users currently approaching 2.5 gigabytes, you wouldn't be alone if you've begun wondering what purposes (other than email warehousing) you can put your account to. My inbox is relentlessly inundated with exciting job offers and marriage proposals from beautiful women, and even I can't utilise such a generous allocation of web space.

You may be accused of being a cheapskate for using your Gmail account to backup your treasured, irreplaceable documents and whatnot, but I think that's unwarranted unless this is your only backup solution. I use a mini, external, USB, Lacie hard drive and a USB thumb drive to stash away my preciouseses, though stupidly leave them lying right next to my computer, usually permanently connected.

This is stupid because if someone broke into your house they'd swipe the lot, or if your house went up in smoke, similarly, your original files and backups would be lost. It makes perfect sense to take your backup drives with you whenever you leave the house, or at least keep them somewhere other than on your computer desk, but how many of us make a habit of this? It's just so much hassle to have to keep disconnecting, reconnecting and hiding your fail-safe devices.

Gmail provides the ideal second backup solution because their servers don't live in your house... unless maybe you're a down on your luck Google employee sleeping under the desk in your office. Gmail accepts attachments up to 10mb in size, so what you can do to safeguard your important documents is zip them up, attach the compressed archive to an email and send it to yourself.

I did this recently with all my HTML document blog entries. The file arrived safely and I archived it for future reference (Gmail cunningly established that the message was from 'me', and so excluded it from the mail available to be downloaded by my email client, which I thought was quite nifty).
When I tried to do this with a batch of Word and Excel documents, the zip file was rejected by the Gmail server. With a bit of investigation I discovered that this was because Gmail automatically scan inside zip files to check if they contain anything which could be construed as malicious. Office documents can contain macro viruses and so Gmail wrinkles up its nose and looks at them as though they're something squidgy you might step in on the pavement.

One way to avoid Gmail's scrutiny is to compress your documents using a lesser known format. Being primarily a Mac user at home, the first one that sprung to my mind was Apple's disk image format. I downloaded FreeDMG and used it to create an archive of my documents and tried again to send it as an attachment. This time Gmail lapped it up without protest. Hoorah!

When you've found a file format Gmail can't look inside, you might like to make some changes to your account so as to better manage your backups. You can do this using the 'create a filter' page, linked from your inbox. Filters are designed to allow Gmail to recognise and process emails bearing predefined characteristics. For instance, if you ticked the 'has attachment' checkbox and typed 'backup' into the 'subject' box, you could arrange for any emails carrying an attachment and containing the keyword 'backup' in the subject field to be assigned a helpful label and automatically archived - the latter two options are available from the page you are taken to when you press the 'next step' button.

Gmail labels operate much like folders in that they allow you to group together collections of emails making them easier to retrieve at a later date. The main advantage they offer over traditional folders is that emails can be assigned with multiple labels without having to duplicate them. Any labels you create are displayed below the links to your inbox, drafts, trash etc. folders for easy access. Whenever you click on one of these labels you are presented with a list of all the emails previously allocated to that category.

If you want to reduce the chance of emails being wrongly assigned to your new backup area, you could beef-up the precision of your filter using 'plus addresses'. Plus addresses can be created 'on the fly' by appending a + symbol and a series of numbers or characters to your username, like so: tom.cruise+backup@gmail.com.

Whenever you send yourself a backup, use this address and remember to edit your filter so the 'to' address matches your +backup address and it will be labelled and archived accordingly. Of course, if disaster struck and you needed to recover your files, you'd have to contact the kooky Scientologist and ask him to hand them over. ;)

Plus addresses have many more practical applications besides. You can use them to split invitation replies into 'accept' and 'decline' categories, trash spam or monitor how your email address is used by the companies you submit it to.

Windows users might like to skip all this emailing yourself malarkey and instead use their Gmail accounts as they would any other drive from within Explorer. If this appeals you'll want to check out the Viksoe Gmail Drive shell extension.

Read More

I think, therefore I type, therefore I backup

Assuming you possess a brain and can type, you are likely to have a number of important personal documents stored on your computer - documents you would be lost without should anything disastrous happen to your hard drive. If you own a CD or DVD writer these could be backed up to a writable disk, however, this is slow and inconvenient if you regularly make changes to these documents (think of your CV or personal web site).

What I've done to address this problem is buy a Smart Media/Compact Flash card reader and a few CF cards to store my data on. The card reader is attached to my computer via a USB cable, and accessing the cards entails nothing more complicated than inserting them into the reader. Whenever I do this, a shortcut to the CF card appears on my desktop allowing me to access it just like a hard drive, whether I'm using Windows or OS X.

Now here comes the clever bit. To backup all my irreplaceable documents, I use a simple, free command utility called F-Sync to synchronise the contents of the folders they reside in. Once you know exactly which folders you need to backup, and where you would like the copies to be placed, you can save this information in a batch file alongside the F-Sync executable and run it whenever the need arises with an effortless double click of the mouse.

To create such a batch file, open a command prompt window and type 'edit backup.bat'. Now type out the commands necessary to create the backups, save the file and select exit from the file menu. For example, my batch file looks like this...

fsync d:\Documents e:\Documents /F fsync d:\Pictures\ e:\Pictures /F fsync d:\Email e:\Email /F /P

The first drive/folder reference should point to the source folder containing the files you wish to backup, whereas the second drive/folder reference should point to the intended destination folder and drive where you would like the duplicates to be placed. The /F switch isn't mandatory, though I use it to skip any confirmation requests so the synchronisation will be carried out in the background while I get on with other tasks. The single /P switch indicates that I'd like F-Sync to pause once it has finished synchronising the third and final folder before closing the DOS window so I can see at a glance how many files have been updated.

Public safety warning - pay close attention

It is absolutely essential that you allocate a separate folder for each stage because by default F-Sync deletes any files or folders which aren't present in the source folder - if you were to synchronise your files to the root of your chosen drive, F-Sync would wipe out everything except the source folder - something I'm sure you'll want to avoid. Incidentally, if you only want to add new files to your backup drive, rather than add new files and delete redundant ones you can use the /C switch to prevent deletion.

Perhaps you'd like to have this backup routine performed automatically each time you boot your computer. If so, why not add backup.bat to your startup menu? To make the process even less intrusive you could use the /S switch to prevent the DOS box from appearing.

Read More

Backing up your legally owned DVDs - a 'how to' guide

A brief introduction to the DVD format

Please sir, can I have some more? Certainly Oliver, how many gigabytes would you like? I am of course talking about data storage space. Once upon a time, having the ability to backup 650mb of data to a CD was a feat met with gasps of awe. Since then the emergence of the digital versatile disk (or DVD) has upped the ante along with the storage capacity possibilities, quite frankly making the trusty CD writer look like a bit of a lightweight. It is now feasible to write up to a whopping 9.4 gigabytes of whatever takes your fancy to a single CD sized disk providing you have the right hardware.

At a glance it's difficult to tell the difference between a CD and a DVD, though judging this particular book by its cover would be highly misleading. Storage capacity represents the most notable distinction between the comparatively minuscule CD and the mighty DVD. Both formats store data within imperceptibly tiny grooves aligned so as to spiral around the surface of the media. Within these grooves are found pits and bumps representing the ones and zeros of digital information that are read by CD/DVD drive lasers.

DVDs are able to store many times more data than CDs owing to the smaller pits and a tighter track spacing of their structural makeup, the landscape of which is scanned by smaller laser beams than those of a CD drive. Without going into great detail, your CD drive, unless it happens to be a CD/DVD combo drive, will never be able to read DVDs because their larger laser beams cannot interpret the smaller surface data structure of DVDs. No matter how many internet rumours you have the misfortune to stumble across relating to this, it cannot be done, no way, no how; if you want to read DVDs you will need to buy a DVD-ROM drive.

A comparison of the many variants

DVDs can accommodate up to four layers of data, two on each side of the disk, in comparison to the single layer offered by CDs. To be able to read the various layers of information, DVD drive lasers alter the intensity of their focus to probe deeper into the disk - each change of focus is known as a 'layer switch'. Note that because the lasers in DVD players and DVD-ROM drives are suspended in a fixed position it is necessary to manually flip over double sided disks in order to access all the data. The possibility of utilising up to four layers of information on a single disk has resulted in the development of four different types of DVD, each distinguished by their data capacities.

Single sided, single layered disks can hold a maximum of 4.7 GB worth of data, while single sided, dual layered disks can hold roughly 8.5 GB. Double sided, single layered disks have the potential to store 9.4 GB worth of data, whereas double sided, dual layered disks can contain approximately 17 GB. At present it is only possible to create DIY DVDs containing no more than 9.4 GB worth of digital delicacies because there are no DVD writers on the market which are capable of burning dual layered disks.

To give you a rough idea of how long you can expect to have to twiddle your thumbs waiting for a full DVD to be written, a 2x writer can record a full 4.7 GB DVD in approximately 30 minutes and a 4x writer would achieve the same task in approximately 15 minutes. From these figures it is clear that CD and DVD drive speeds cannot be directly equated; a 2x speed DVD writer works much faster than a 2x CD writer.

DVDs come in three flavours; DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and DVD-ROM. DVD-Video disks contain a combination of audio and video content and are used to store the movies you can buy in stores or rent from Blockbuster et al. DVD-Audio disks, although far less common in mainstream retail outlets, are used to store high fidelity, multi channel stereo music. DVD-ROMs are computer compatible disks used for data archival purposes, much like the CD-R format only with greater scope.

To further complicate the state of affairs, there are three DVD recordable formats; DVD-RAM, DVD-R/DVD-RW and DVD+R/DVD+RW. At present they are to be considered competing formats as a de facto standard has yet to be decided upon. Unsurprisingly this creates all kinds of quandaries for the consumer, not least the fact that the various formats are incompatible with one another - a single format DVD-R/RW drive is incapable of writing to DVD+R/RW disks and vice versa.

Also, there's a good chance that your home made DVD movies will not work in your standalone DVD player. To avoid such dilemmas you can either buy a writer which supports multiple formats (commonly known as a combo drive), or you can patiently bide your time until one or the other drive/media rises victorious from the ashes of the format war before taking the plunge.

DVD-RAM disks have more in common with hard drives than with CD-R or CD-RW disks as they can be written to up to a hundred thousand times and do not need to be reformatted before use. They can store up to 9.4 GB worth of data on a double sided disk, though because most DVD players and DVD-ROM drives do not support them, DVD-RAM drives aren't worth considering unless your requirements do not extend beyond backing up computer data and re-using that data on a single computer or multiple computers which have DVD-RAM drives installed. My prediction is that the DVD-RAM format will disappear into obscurity in the near future leaving the pluses to do battle with the minuses.

The DVD-R format, devised by Pioneer, has the advantage over DVD-RAM that it is supported by most DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. DVD-R disks are capable of storing 4.7 GB worth of data per side yet they can only be written once. Keeping it within the family, DVD-RW disks can be written up to a thousand times and can also contain 4.7 GB of data per side. Likewise they are compatible with most DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. DVD-R media can additionally be divided into DVD-R(A) disks which are designed for professional authoring, and DVD-R(G) disks which are intended to be used for general use.

Of the three formats, DVD+R is the only one to offer complete compatibility with existing DVD players, and because it is backed by a number of the most important names in the computer industry (Dell, Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Sony) it has a good chance of outliving the competition to become 'the one' - I'm sure The Highlander would be proud. DVD+R drives are not able to read or write to DVD-RAM disks but gain ground because they are backwards compatible with CD-R and CD-RW disks. The usual 4.7 GB per side capacity rule applies and they can be re-written up to a thousand times.

It's worth noting at this point that older DVD players cannot play any kind of re-writable disk so if you intend to use this type of media you will have to either invest in a new DVD player or only play back re-writable disks in your computer's DVD drive. The newer your DVD player, the better chance it has of correctly reading your disks irrespective of the format they take.

Making your DVD player region free

Like Bill Gates, motion picture studios are evil, which is why they try to insist that you only buy DVDs from within the same geographic region in which you bought your DVD-ROM or DVD player. They do try to defend their motivations for doing so with a number of plausible sounding justifications i.e. because movies are released at the cinema at different dates across the globe, DVD release dates have to be carefully regulated so as to ensure that people in the UK, for instance, cannot buy a movie DVD while that same movie is still being shown at the cinema, though I still think my original explanation is more apt. ;)

Working in cahoots with the naughty people in the movie biz, the DVD Copy Control Association assert that anyone wanting to manufacture a DVD-ROM drive or DVD player must implement region code restrictions into their hardware. This can be changed a maximum of five times by the user and a further four times if the unit is returned to the manufacturer.

When this system was first introduced it was met by a public backlash; unsurprisingly many people were not prepared to have their consumer rights compromised for the sake of helping the movie industry to line its already bulging pockets. It was soon discovered that it was possible to circumvent this protection to force DVD drives/players to play all DVDs regardless of where they originated, hence the region-free DVD player was born. The code which stipulates which DVDs can be played in a particular DVD player is stored on a chip very similar to that of a motherboard BIOS chip, and as a result they can be 'flashed' to change the way they function in an identical fashion.

To make a DVD player region free you have to update the player's firmware with a patched version. Your first task is to identify the model number of your DVD drive and find out if it is region locked - you can do this using a utility known as Drive Region Info. It's very unlikely that your drive will already be region free, but if Drive Region Info reveals that it is, you obviously do not need to alter your firmware.

Once you know the model number of your drive you can download patched firmware for it from 'The Firmware Page' and apply it in the usual way (as described in the misc. section of the FAQ). As always, remember to heed the warnings found in the readme.txt file of the relevant 'flashkit' archive and follow the instructions to the letter, otherwise you could do permanent damage to your hardware. When you reboot your computer, load Drive Region Info again to check that the changes have taken effect.

Creating data DVDs and extracting movie DVDs to your hard drive

Creating your own data DVD is accomplished in exactly the same way as you would write a CD-R/RW. In Nero, for instance, you would select 'new' from the 'file' menu and then choose the DVD option from the drop down selection box before clicking 'OK'. Files can be added to the compilation by dragging and dropping them into the empty pane below the new DVD title. Once you are ready to commit your choices to disk you can write the DVD by clicking on the 'write' dialog box, making sure you check the 'finalise' option if you do not wish to add anything to the DVD at a later date.

Unfortunately Nero is incapable of backing up commercial, copyright protected data, movie or audio DVDs, and similarly trying to merely copy the files to your hard drive will achieve very little. Game copyright protection mechanisms have already been covered elsewhere on this site so should be familiar territory. Movie copyright protection on the other hand may be new to you so we will briefly look into this before moving onto discussing possible ways to get around it. Nearly all movies worth watching are encrypted using the content scrambling system (CSS) so cannot be copied using standard CD/DVD writing tools, or simple copy and paste techniques.

For your DVD player to be able to access these disks at all, the key which decrypts the scrambled data before streaming it to your TV or computer monitor has to be provided alongside the 'lock'. To prevent people from copying protected disks these keys are kept well hidden in the normally inaccessible lead-in area of the disk. Whenever you try to copy such a disk you get the scrambled data, but not the key which allows you to make sense of that data. As a result, errors are spat out at you whenever you try to play back the protected content from your hard drive i.e. the movie .VOB files which contain an amalgamation of video, audio and subtitle streams.

I realise warning you what not to do isn’t a great deal of help on its own, so now would be an opportune moment to tell you what you should be doing. Downloading DVD Decrypter would be an excellent place to start - this will provide the means to create an image of a protected DVD which can be stored on your hard drive for further manipulation or play back. It's free and luckily is no more difficult to use than Clone CD, a program you are perhaps more familiar with. Let's get to work. Run the program and insert the DVD you wish to decrypt into your DVD drive. DVD Decrypter should detect the disk and locate the most suitable drive or partition on which to store the extracted data i.e. the one with the most free space available.

I should point out at this stage of the proceedings that because a movie extracted to a single ISO file will consume upwards of 4 GB of hard disk space, the partition you intend to store the file on must have been formatted to use the NTFS file system. This is because FAT32 doesn't support files of this magnitude. If you don’t have an NTFS partition available and do not wish to convert one of your FAT32 partitions you will have to use the 'file' rather than the ISO output option of DVD Decrypter (files contained on DVD-Video disks cannot be greater than 1 GB in size), but more of that later.

DVD Decrypter will auto-magically select all the constituent parts of the movie, leaving you only the task of prodding the DVD to hard drive transfer button in the bottom left corner of the application GUI. Within 30 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer hardware and the length of the movie, the transfer of the movie VOB files to your hard drive will be complete.

These can now be played using a range of software DVD players, the best of which are thought to be Win DVD and Power DVD. In Power DVD you can do this by pressing control and O to access the open menu followed by selecting "open DVD files on hard disk drive". Finally from within the subsequent dialog box choose the VIDEO_TS.IFO file extracted by DVD Decryper (IFO files contain navigational information used by your DVD player to jump between chapters etc).

To achieve the same thing in Power DVD you first have to create a folder on the root of your hard drive called VIDEO_TS (note this is case sensitive) as you would find on the original DVD and move all the extracted files into it. To play back the movie you would then click on the options button and select the hard drive where the files are stored.

If you'd rather turn your DVDs into ISO files and play them using a CD/DVD mounting tool such as Daemon Tools then that is also possible with DVD Decrypter. In this case you would select ISO (the 'read' variant obviously) from the 'mode' menu before hitting the start button.

As you've probably gathered by now this is a great way to backup your DVD movies if you aren't lucky enough to own a DVD writer, assuming you have plenty of spare hard drive real estate that is. If you have got a DVD writer you might like to learn how to go about writing your extracted files to a blank DVD (or two). This will be our next task.

Because DVDs come on either dual layered 8.5 GB disks (DVD-9) or single layered 4.7 GB disks (DVD-5) they cannot all be duplicated in the same way. The most notable stumbling block is the fact that no DVD writers exist that can write dual layered disks, so if you want to copy a DVD-9 disk you have to either use two recordable DVDs, down sample the DVD to make it fit on a single disk, chop out the extra features to save space and then write it to a single disk or use a combination of these methods.

Backing up DVD-5 and DVD-9 disks to recordable DVDs

Backing up a DVD-5 disk is a cinch as it is possible to create a 1:1 copy using only DVD Decrypter. Assuming you have created an ISO image of the DVD you wish to backup using the methods described earlier, all you have to do to write the file to a recordable DVD is to select Mode > ISO > Write from within the DVD Decrypter interface, insert a blank disk and hit the hard drive to DVD transfer button.

The trouble is, most modern DVD disks are of the DVD-9 variety so unfortunately they cannot be backed up using this method. It would seem that there are nearly as many methods to backup such disks as there are DVDs. Everyone has their own favoured means and it's difficult to say outright which, if any, is superior because they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Perhaps the most sensible thing to do is choose the one which suits you and not get too caught up arguing your case for or against using one piece of software or the other... which is exactly what I'll proceed to do now because I have no self control. ;)

The process can be as easy or difficult as you want it to be - some DVD copying guides will span many pages and list up to a hundred time consuming steps which you must follow to the letter in order to produce a working backup. Those people who put their faith in such methods rationalise that only by doing this can you create perfect copies indistinguishable from the original. They may well be right if you're the type of person who can spot a needle in a haystack from a hundred yards while wearing sun glasses during an eclipse, but for everyone else, the quick and easy methods will suffice.

Also keep in mind that as time goes on, more and more one-click DVD backer-up-erers will appear on the market; the extraction/writing process will become more refined and there will be even less evidence to support doing things the hard way (as I type, the people behind the award winning Clone CD are working on a DVD hybrid which should be the answer to many frustrated DVD devotee's dreams). Quality issues aside, of course there will always be people who will continue to do everything manually using a number of different programs because they think it makes them look l33t (that's quite clever with computers for anyone who doesn't speak hacker).

One of my favourite methods which involves a few more steps than your average idiot-proof, Clone CD style tool is to extract the movie using DVD Decrypter and then write it to a single DVD using Pinnacle's Instant Copy (he says backtracking slightly from recommending one click solutions). This method allows you to cram a full DVD-9 movie onto a single recordable DVD, although it does detract from the video quality of the original movie somewhat.

First of all, extract the movie data from the DVD using the Mode > File method, select all the files from within the 'edit' menu and begin transferring them to your hard disk using the transfer button in the bottom left hand corner of the DVD Decrypter GUI. Once the task is complete it's time to whip out Instant Copy and set it to work. From within the 'source' menu option choose hard disk, select the folder where your movie data files are stored and locate the VIDEO_TS.IFO file. Now select the destination DVD writer drive and click on the DVD tab. Change the copy method to 'Customised Resize' and the preferred destination to DVD and press the start button.

You will now be required to configure the video size settings. The challenge here is to reduce the video size and hence the file sizes so that they fit on a single recordable DVD. You can either reduce the video size of the main movie and the extras indiscriminately or you can reduce the video size of the extras while maintaining the video size of the main movie; it's all about compromising to find the right balance. Look at the contents box and you will see a folder labelled 'Video Tracks'. If you click on this, a list of all the components of the movie will appear (you will easily be able to recognise the main movie as it will be many times longer than the supporting files). Select each of them one by one and under the 'video' tab drag the slider to resize the video accordingly.

The options under the 'audio' tab allow you to selectively remove audio tracks (if you only speak English you might like to remove the multi-language support entirely), and the 'subtitles' tab provides the means to hack out the subtitles to recoup even more space - no great loss unless you suffer from hearing difficulties of course. When the data size bar turns green (to indicate that the files are small enough to fit on a single recordable DVD) and you're happy to commit your amendments to file, click the OK button to begin converting the movie.

The process will take anywhere up to six hours to complete so you might want to set it up to work over night or while you're out at work, school or wherever (if you're not prepared to wait this long you might like to use a program called DVD2One instead of Instant Copy - the quality of the resulting movies isn't as good, but you can extract and write a DVD in under an hour). Once complete, a dialog box will appear requesting you to insert a blank DVD. Do as it says and our work here is done.

The one click method

All in one conversion tools that claim to create perfect DVD backups are nothing new, though when it comes to the crunch, many of the authors of such programs are exposed as blatant charlatans as they do nothing of the kind. Instead they produce DVD rips in SVCD or DivX format without the need for a DVD writer. These kinds of rips would be perfectly acceptable if what you require are reasonable quality movies in a format small enough to fit on a CD-R, however, what I object to are the false claims which typify the spiel of far too many DVD software authors. Separating the hype from the truth can be a time consuming process, though one technique I often use is to quickly scan through the introductory text on DVD software web sites to pick out the text which has obviously been translated from Korean, Chinese or Japanese using Babelfish.

This may sound totally ethnocentric and narrow minded, yet you'd be surprised by how many frauds can be exposed by this simple method. Besides, if you've created a quality product to be proud of, you don't present it to an English speaking audience using sloppy, grammatically incorrect Engrish. If your English is terrible, but you're a talented programmer, for your sake, get a native English speaker to help you - otherwise your work will be dismissed by prejudiced people like me even if the code is top notch. ;) If your English and your programming is terrible, for my sake, don't bother at all.

Finding the real deal is a rarity - DVD X Copy is probably the closest you'll get. It doesn't create copies which are identical to the original movie, but it comes so close it's not worth splitting hairs. Because DVD X Copy has been deemed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to be in breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 321 Studios, the authors of DVD X Copy, have had to implement a number of conciliatory features into the program to sidestep potential legal battles.

What this means for the consumer is that the movies created by DVD X Copy have to be tampered with, which brings into question just how "perfect" the results truly are. Firstly, the program stamps its own copyright protection onto your movies to prevent further duplication. Secondly, a digital watermark is embedded into your movies so as to aid identification of the licensed owner of the software used to create the duplicate. Finally, a disclaimer is appended to the beginning of all movies to inform viewers that the disk is a backup copy intended for personal use only.

"Personal use" is the key term here; the DMCA states that the owner of an original DVD is perfectly entitled to create a single backup copy of that disk providing the duplicate is only watched in private and is not distributed either freely or for profit. For the MPAA to obtain a court order insisting that the product be withdrawn from the market they would have to prove that DVD X Copy is being used first and foremost as a piracy tool; a task they are currently working on. At least for now, consumers can continue to exercise their right to backup their legally owned DVDs safeguarded by their 'fair use' agreement.

Legal wranglings aside, DVD X Copy provides the means to backup almost identical copies of DVD-5 or DVD-9 disks including menus, trailers and special features. DVD-5 disks can be backed up in their entirety to a single recordable DVD, whereas two disks are required to back up a DVD-9 movie assuming you do not want to lose any of the accompanying extras. If saving a recordable disk is a higher priority you can have DVD X Copy remove all such material leaving you with only the main movie which will comfortably fit on a single recordable disk. When you first insert the DVD you intend to copy, DVD X Copy will inform you whether or not it will fit on a single disk.

If it won't, the main movie is copied to the first disk and the extras are stored on the second disk, while particularly long movies are spanned across two disks. How the second disk begins playing when inserted is your decision - it can either begin instantly or be selected from the main menu. The exact point at which longer movies are split is initially decided for you, yet you always have the option to alter the default selection if it does not suit your requirements.

When you're happy with your choices you can press the 'copy now' button to begin transferring the files to your hard drive. If you have a separate DVD-ROM drive and DVD writer you may like to use the extremely useful 'output disk is ready' feature, which allows you to insert a blank DVD into your writer at the same time as you insert the source disk and have DVD X Copy begin writing to it once the creation of the temporary files on your hard drive is complete. Otherwise you will be expected to baby sit the process until the extraction is complete and then switch disks.

So there you have it; the ability to create one click, hands free DVD backups is now within reach. The decision to use this method should ultimately be based upon weighing up the advantages of speed and simplicity against the ability to have complete control over your backups. Personally I think it's a small sacrifice to make, and in any case since you should only be making copies for personal use, you only have yourself to please. If your backups are good enough for you, feel free to ignore the the ultra-picky elitists - most of them are just grumpy because people are less impressed by their skills now that your average silver surfer can achieve the same results with minimal technical know-how. ;)

Read More

The lamb they couldn't silence

Just recently I had an email from a Kookosity reader informing me that Clone CD had been discontinued. This isn't actually the case though you'd be forgiven for thinking so judging by the terminal 'game over' message left in place of the section of the Elaborate Bytes web site devoted to the no. 1 CD duplication tool.

Owing to the introduction of new copyright laws in Germany, where Elby are based, Clone CD could no longer be sold and supported within the country of its origin. Therefore to keep the project alive, the rights to continue developing the software were sold to Antiguan-based company, Slysoft Inc, who will not have to operate under the duress of such stringent copyright laws. Two of the three programmers responsible for creating Clone CD have relocated and continue to update it on behalf of the new owners. It doesn't take a genius to join the dots - Ollie, the founder of Elby, likely has a very conveniently placed finger in the Slysoft pie... allegedly. ;)

As a consequence of the legal ping-pong between Elby and The Powers That Be, Clone CD has fallen behind the competition, though loyal fans can rest assured that Slysoft fully intend to make up lost ground to re-capture the no. 1 spot in the CD protection bypassing biz. An updated and re-badged version of Clone CD has already left the starting blocks and the word is that it represents a step in the right direction.

The most significant change in this rendering is that Virtual Clone Drive, the CD emulation software integrated into previous versions of Clone CD, has had to be omitted as the rights to distribute it were not included in the deal agreed upon between Elby and Slysoft. Slysoft, in recognition that this is a popular component of the software, plan to code their own CDless ISO mounting gadget in the not too distant future.

Read More

I want to use a CD image backup, but haven't got a CD writer. Is there any way I can run it from my hard drive?

Yes, it's possible to do this. First of all you need to get hold of a program that is capable of extracting .iso format files - Win Image will do very nicely. Install the program, run it, select the 'file' option from the menu bar and choose the 'open' option. Search through your hard drive for the .iso file you wish to decompress and double-click on it. Return to the menu bar, but this time select the 'image' option and scroll down the list until you come across the word 'extract'. If you click on this, a dialogue box should appear to ask you where you would like to extract the files to. Pick a suitable directory and press the extract button.

For application CD images you can just browse through the extracted files until you find one labelled setup.exe or install.exe and run it. Once the program is installed you will no longer need the extracted files so they can be deleted to conserve hard drive space (remember to keep the .iso file generated from your original CD, however, in case you need to re-install it at a later date).

On the other hand, if you are attempting to install a game to avoid having to keep your original CD in your optical drive, your task is going to be a bit more tricky. First of all you will have to choose one of two options. The first is to install the game and overwrite the main executable file with a copyright protection stripped version, available from Game Copy World. In this case, the game would be playable, but because the replacement executable bypasses any CD checks, you will probably lose any audio tracks and/or video sequences stored within the CD image. If you decide to take this path, make sure you select the 'full installation' option, if there is one, when you install the game to ensure that your hard drive can read the maximum amount of data available without accessing the CD itself.

If you are a bit more patient, a better option would be to use a piece of CD emulation software e.g. Virtual Drive, Daemon Tools or Fantom CD. These allow you to trick your computer into thinking that the CD image on your hard drive is actually a real CD sitting in your optical drive. Once you have one of these installed, all you have to do is select the CD image you wish to run and choose the 'mount' function. This will create a new virtual CD icon, which can be accessed through Explorer in the same way as any other conventional CD.

As these tools incorporate 'on the fly' data decompression, your CD images will take up minimal space on your hard drive until the moment they are accessed. Also, because hard drives are many times faster than optical ones, your games will run at a lightning fast pace without leaving you twiddling your thumbs waiting for them to spin up.

To begin using a virtual CD, simply double-click on its icon as though it were a real CD and wait for the installation menu to appear. If you now proceed to install the game in the customary fashion you can play it as usual, but with the added bonus that you'll never be able to lose the CD - because there isn't one!

Read More

How can I divide a large file into smaller segments so it can be sent via email or backed up to a floppy disk?

One option available to you is to use a freeware program known as HJ Split. The beauty of this tool is that it is tiny and no installation is necessary to run it. Just double click on the the file's icon, select the file you wish to break up, let HJ Split know the size of the resulting chunks you would like to create and finally click on the start button to begin the process. HJ Split will also recombine these files for you once they reach their final destination, so if you want to email them to a friend make sure you also send them the program itself.

Since most people will already have installed on their system some sort of compression tool, you may instead like to create a spanned, compressed archive. Winzip, Winace and Winrar are equally adept at this task so you may as well use whichever one you happen to have installed.

Take Winzip, for instance; to span a file across multiple disks, create a zip file in the usual manner and when requested to choose a location to store the resulting archive in, select your floppy drive. If the file exceeds the capacity of a single disk, when it becomes full, Winzip will request you to insert another disk to which it can continue backing up your data.

From within the same menu, it is also possible to use Winzip to chop up compressed archives using arbitrary cut off points and save the files to your hard drive.

You want to create a rar archive instead? You would wouldn't you, you awkward so and so. ;) Luckily, that's no more difficult than spanning a zip file. Locate the files you wish to add to your rar archive and highlight them, right-click on one of them and select 'add to archive'. When the 'archive name and parameters' menu appears, give your archive-to-be an appropriate name and then in the box that reads 'split to volumes, bytes' type in, or select the size of the data chunks you would like Winrar to create. Click OK and your task is complete. That wasn't too painful, was it?

Read More

How can I backup my PlayStation games?

Like PC games, PlayStation games are copy protected so in order to copy them you will have to find a way of bypassing this protection. Two methods of doing this are detailed below. By far the simplest of these is to use Clone CD to dump an image of the game you wish to copy onto your hard drive and then burn it to a CD-R. I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of this procedure again here since it has already been covered in detail in the disk images tutorial. I would suggest you read around the subject there if you want to go down this route.

The second option is much more complicated and involves applying a patch to your game CD before being able to make a successful duplicate. The idea is that you create a CD image of the game you wish to copy using the 'raw' option of CD-R Win, apply a patch to remove any copy protection and then burn the image to a blank CD. Again, I'm not going to rehash what has already been said about this essential program here. If you're new to CD-R Win make sure you check out my advice in the disk images tutorial before reading any further.

PlayStation games are patched in one of two ways. You can either run a stand-alone executable file in the same directory as your image file, or use the PPF Patch Engine to apply a patch file with a pff extension. Stand-alone executables, as the name suggests, need no further tools to apply them and can be found in many of the same places where you would search for main exe replacements for PC games. GameCopyWorld for example.

Remember, the same rules which apply to the removal of PC game copyright protection also apply to PlayStation games, so make sure you get the correct patch version for the game you wish to copy, otherwise it won't work. For PlayStation games this means checking that the PAL or NTSC version of the patch matches that of the game.

If you have a more recent patch it is likely to be in pff format. Again, these files must reside in the same location as your CD image file to function correctly. Note that sometimes the patcher will be included in the same directory as your patch so you won't need to search for it elsewhere.

Once you have created your CD image file using CD-R Win, open the DOS console and enter the directory where your image is stored. Now type 'applyppf' followed by the name of your bin file, followed by the name of the ppf patch file. The correct command should look something like this: 'applyppf mybinfile.bin mypatch.ppf'. Providing the encouraging 'patch successful' message is displayed you can proceed to burn the image to a blank CD and subsequently play-test the game.

Read More

How can I backup my Sega Dreamcast games?

You can't - at least not yet anyway. You see, Dreamcast games use a completely different file structure to CD-Rs, which allows them to hold up to 1gb of gaming goodness on a single CD. These CDs are known as GD-Roms (the GD stands for Gigabyte Disc). The upshot of this is that you can't just make a 1:1 copy using your ordinary CD writing software and CD writer. At present, ripping a Dreamcast game is a very complicated procedure, the exact details of which are still kept closely under wraps. For this reason, you can't just pop a game disk into your CD writer and make yourself a duplicate from it.

Read More

I want to backup one of my original CDs. How can I tell whether or not it has been copyright protected?

You can sometimes guess what method of protection has been implemented manually by looking at the contents or the physical structure of a CD, but a much more accurate way would be to use ClonyXXL. This completely free utility will automatically detect the presence of a multitude of different protection systems and report its findings in an easy to understand format. Once you have this vital information at your fingertips, you can enter it into Clone CD to produce a perfect backup.

Read More

Life's too short for re-installing

I followed your instructions in order to make a backup of my Windows partition using Ghost, but didn't include the installation of all my games in this backup. Having formatted my boot partition they no longer run from my extended partition. Is there anything I can do to fix this, or do I have to reinstall all my games?

No, you don't have to reinstall all your games, which should come as a relief since the installation of most modern games can be anywhere between 0.5 and 2 gigabytes in size, and can take a ridiculously long time to setup. The reason they won't work once you've formatted your drive is because the registry entries, which were made when you installed the games have been lost. Without these entries many games will refuse to even read from the CD. What you have to do to fix this problem is get yourself one of the more advanced registry editors/cleaners and use it to backup these registry entries before you format your drive. jv16 Power Tools comes highly recommended so why not head over to Macecraft.com and grab that straight away.

If you install the program and load it up, you will be presented with a list of all the applications and games you have installed on your computer, along with the registry entries associated with them. Now here comes the clever bit so pay attention. If you wanted to be able to play Dune 4 after formatting your hard drive, for instance, you would scroll down the list until you come to the Westwood entries. For this game there are three separate sections, one for each component of the game - the main game, the shared internet components and the auto update feature. Right-click on the first entry and select 'advanced info'. This will open a window containing all the registry keys which would be removed if you were to uninstall the game. Choose the 'save list as text' option and export the information to a text file. Repeat this process for all three sections. Open the three text files in Notepad and combine them into one by copying and pasting the information.

We're almost there now, so bare with me for another minute. You now have to make space at the top of the text file and enter 'REGEDIT4' onto the first line. This serves to inform your operating system of exactly how you would like the file to be processed - using the Windows built-in registry tool, Registry Editor. Rename this text file to something similar to d4.reg (the extension is the important thing here, the filename could be anything) and put it in a safe place where you won't lose it.

To play Dune 4 after you have formatted your boot drive in future, you would simply locate this reg file and double click on it to add the entries back into the registry. After doing that, find the drive you installed the game to and run the main executable from there. To speed the process up for next time, you could make a shortcut to the game and place it on your desktop.

Repeat the process for all your games and you've solved the problem. It may take you a long time, but remember, this only has to be done once for each game.

Read More

What is over-burning, and how do I do it?

Over-burning is a term used in reference to cramming more data onto a CD-R than the capacity should theoretically allow. It is used when the CD you wish to copy has marginally more data on it than will fit on a 74 or 80 minute CD-R. Often this is done in a deliberate attempt by the software manufacturers to make duplication of their products more difficult. If an original CD has been over-burnt you will have to follow suit in order to make a backup and get everything to fit. Note that I use the word 'marginally' above; you cannot go on expanding the capacity of a CD indefinitely. A good rule of thumb is to set the limit at about an extra 4 minutes when using a standard 74 or 80 minute CD-R.

Not all CD writing software supports the over-burning feature, but I know for a fact that Nero is definitely one of the ones that does. OK, enough rambling. Here's the procedure you need to follow: open Nero and select 'options' from the 'file' menu followed by 'expert options'. Now check the box that says 'allow over-burn' and set the maximum capacity of the CD you wish to oversize. When you attempt to over-burn your next CD, Nero will check to see if you really want to go ahead with this. Just tell it, "yes, I'm not mad and I know perfectly well what I'm doing", and commence burning while singing, "burn baby burn, disco inferno!" (OK, so the last bit's optional, ahem!).

Read More