How to Protect Your Video Games
Any Xbox 360 owner is by now familiar with its oh-so-charming quirks. Such as its high failure rate, loud overworked fans, and the infamous red ring of death. However there is one error that some are not as familiar with: that the DVD drive itself can etch a circular scratch into game discs as they spin. This can be anywhere from minor cosmetic damage to a scratch that renders the disc unreadable. Sometimes a 360’s DVD drive will be resistant to read games that are anything less than perfect so even minor scratches can bar you from enjoying your games. Given this I started to play backup copies of my 360 games instead.
Games are so huge that they need to be compressed onto disc so that all the information can fit into the space. Games are also designed in a manner that requires them to access data from all over the disc at a constant rate. So that means there’s no way to skip past a damaged area on the disc as one can with a DVD, games are just not segmented. There’s no real way to prevent scratches from ever happening and it’s impossible to tell if a scratch was particularly destructive until it’s too late. Packaging, storing, handling discs can damage them, children and pets can also damage them, and this can render your expensive games completely useless.
The best way to avoid damage to your discs is to simply not use them, you can make backups of them and play the backup in your 360 instead. Creating a backup copy of your purchased games is completely legal so long as the copy is for personal use, it’s also very easy, all you need is your computer and some special software. You don’t even need to install a mod chip in order to make it work, with the software you’ll have everything you need to make an exact copy.
So why wait when you can start protecting your games and enjoy them longer with backup copies?