"Backing Up" computer games is all about making a copy of your game which you can use-and-abuse, rather than putting your original game at risk. To do this, you just need to be able to copy the game onto another disc and play the game with your new disc. However, because many people have been illegally copying games, they have become extremely hard to duplicate, which can be a problem. This tutorial is going to show you how to make backup PC games.

What You Will Need

Before you begin, you will need several tools and pieces of equipment to backup your games:

• the original game
• CloneCD (free trial)
• a DVD burner
• blank DVD

How To Backup Your Games

To back up your games, you first need to get your hands on Clone CD. This is a powerful tool which allows your computer to copy game discs, and can be downloaded from slysoft.com as a free trial. Once you have downloaded the software, install it and then run it. It will bring up a screen with 4 buttons on. Choose the button with 2 CDs on it.

Clicking this button will bring up the "copy on the fly" screen, where you are able to duplicate a disc in one continuous process. To do this, you first need to put the original game disc in the DVD drive so it can read it. Once this has been done, select a write speed of 4X and then click "copy".

The copying process should take no longer than 40 minutes, depending on your PC's speed. What will happen is that the software will first read the original game disc and then save its contents onto a blank one, meaning that you will end up having to change the discs in the drive half way through the copying process. And once CloneCD has copied the data from one disc to another, it should post a success message. This is when you've completed your backup!

How To Play Your Newly Backed Up Games

Playing your games that have just been backed up is not as simple as copying them. This is because many of the copyright measures on the latest PC games are uncopyable, meaning that in order to play your new game, you will need to do a few minor tweaks to your system which are very simple to do.