DVD Cloner

DVD-CLONER designed to backup your favorite DVD movies. Have you stored your DVD movies properly? According to a survey among movie fans, we find that half of them can't keep their movies more than 3 years due to the following reasons:

• 24% accidentally damaged by children or pets
• 25% naturally worn or damaged by defective DVD player
• 25% lost
• 13% become unusable itself or by unfavorable weather
• 13% others

So it is critical to backup your DVD movies and DVD-CLONER becomes your best choice. >>>

dvdSanta: The Most Easy to Use DVD Creating Tool

dvdSanta is an All-in-One software that lets you copy, create, convert and burn your DVD movies. It can copy 9GB double layer DVD movies into a 4.7GB DVD-R disc, can turn your photos into DVD movies with Hollywood style motion effects, can convert other video formats (avi, wmv, vob, asf, DivX, Mpeg,...) into DVD video, can transfer miniDV camcorder tapes directly to DVD video. >>>

The Need for Backup

by Kevin J. Vella
Uniblue Systems

I really hope that what you are going to read in the next few lines has never happened to you. It was a Sunday, Sunday the 23rd November 2003 at 4 p.m. to be precise. I was in my final months of Graduate Business School, working on a paper due the following week. Also, two chapters of my research project were ready and stashed on my hard drive – no hard copies, just bits and bytes created over a three months. I was punching away at my keyboard when all of a sudden, my notebook slowed dramatically. I started closing down open applications in the hope of speeding up my machine. I was not too worried though as this had happened to me before. My fix was the usual reboot. While my machine was rebooting I obliviously went to fix myself a sandwich. When I returned to my desk, I saw a black screen with a one short phrase: “drive C not present, retry, ignore, abort?” Naturally, I clicked retry. Seconds after the screen went black. I felt an eeriness seeping through my innards. I tried rebooting again. White words, blank screen, panic. Reboot again and again. My mind, glued up. I spent the next ten hours playing with this blessed machine. The next day, I took the hard drive to her office to try taking an image of the blessed device. The result: nothing, except anger, loss and regret.

I lost 2.5 Gigabytes – two years worth of assignments, documents, lecture notes and articles. On top of that, the notebook that I was using was the same one I used at work. On it I also had stored four years worth of work documents, brochures, customer databases, emails, email addresses, marketing plans, competitive information, and much more. Nothing was backed up and hardly little was printed.

Why didn’t I back up? I honestly thought that disaster happens to other people. I thought of backup as a tedious procedure to take all the files on one drive and individually stick them onto floppies or on some other storage device. I firmly believed that my hard drive would never die on me while I was studying. After this episode, I did however buy several USB drives and a CD Burner. I also spent a fortune in CDs to store the individual files I created after 11.22.

Most people and, sadly enough, most businesses, only react to disaster after the damage is done. This is “OK” because, at least, they are doing something to prevent future attacks. However, can you imagine if I were to put a price tag on the data I lost, the time I wasted in trying to recover the data, the products I bought, the time my colleagues spent helping, the time and money spent to build the customer database? I put in the region of $50,000 to $75,000 including lost potential short-term revenues for my company.

My strategy for preventing disaster was seriously flawed. True, you must save and save again however imaging a hard drive in its native format onto a number of media is not a long-term solution. There are better ways of doing it. Backup software allows you to take all your data and compress it into an archive that is small enough to be handled on the least amount of storage devices. My method is expensive and extremely time consuming because there is my physical and constant input while backup software essentially does everything on its own.

I hope I have raised an urgency rather than mere awareness to the importance of backing up. Over the coming weeks, I will cover two other important aspects – the need for a planned backup strategy (if you have a business) and the features that you have to look out for if you want an all-round robust backup solution.

Ironically, since then I have changed jobs and am now working for Uniblue Systems, the makers of WinBackup 2.0. This is how seriously I am taking backing up!

WinBackup 2.0 Standard
Backup Made Easy

The home and small office backup solution that awards 100% reliability and superior performance. Awarded Best Backup Software by Computer Shopper and termed "exceptionally simple to use" by PC World, WinBackup 2.0 Standard is now the obvious choice for home and small office users. Being one of the most efficient and reliable backup solutions available WinBackup 2.0 Standard will help you save both time and money.

Click Here to Learn More...

Pocket DVD Wizard

The Pocket DVD Wizard allows you to make backup copies of your personal DVD's, Mpeg, AVI and DivX video and then play them on your Windows Mobile™ Pocket PC.

Imagine the possibilities! You can now record your favorite TV program with your DVD recorder and transfer it to your Pocket PC, then watch it later in the office, or on the beach! >>>

A DVD-5 (single sided) DVD-Video disc will hold nominally 133 minutes of high quality MPEG-2 encoded video, together with three surround-sound audio channels and four subtitle channels. (Without video compression one DVD-5 disc would hold only about 3 minutes of video).

A DVD-9 (dual layer) disc increases the playing time to 240 minutes of continuous video.

A DVD-10 (double sided) disc will hold a nominal 133 minutes on each side (ie 266 minutes in all), but the disc needs to be turned over to play the other side.

A DVD-18 (dual layer, doubled sided) disc can hold 240 minutes on each side and the disc also needs to be turned over to play the other side.

Most DVD is D9 or D5 format. DVD-Cloner can clone D9 to just ONE DVDr/rw disc (D5 format) without evident losing.