Piracy notwithstanding, there are some good, valid reasons for making a backup of a DVD. K9Copy, a utility for copying DVDs, receives high marks in many forums, so I took it for a spin -- and found out its reputation is deserved.

This is an overview of 5 most popular applications for ripping DVDs in Linux: dvd::rip, K9Copy, AcidRip, thoggen and HandBrake.

4 applications for ripping DVDs on Linux: K9Copy, dvd::rip, acidrip and Thoggen.

K3b

Just over a year ago, we offered a semi-easy way to rip DVDs in Linux to video files. Had we been up on AcidRip, we could've saved ourselves about 900 words.

K3B is an application that ships in the default KDE packages in most distributions, however it’s a very useful tool that can often be overlooked. K3B is a CD and DVD burning application that makes it easy to burn data, audio and disc images onto writable CDs and DVDs. It is a very mature, stable and fully featured application.

K3b is the KDE CD/DVD burner, capable of burning data CDs/DVDs, as well as CD/dvd ISO images, create audio CDs, rip audio CDs and video DVDs. Statistics show it is the favourite burning application of Linux users.

The last few days I have been testing backup software to automatically backup my desktop Ubuntu system. I've only just got it set up, but rdiff-backup is exactly what I was looking for and seems to be working very well.

Mandriva, the Linux vendor, has announced "Click'n'Backup", its own web based backup system. The service, reminiscent of the recently launched Canonical's Ubuntu One, includes online secure storage space and a backup and restore tool. Unlike Ubuntu One, the backup and restore tools are available for non-Mandriva Linux systems, Windows and Mac OS X.