I am just starting to backup my game collection, as I have noticed more and more scratches on my CD/DVDs over time. Let me be clear: I am only backing up games that I have purchased and own. I have downloaded the trial of Alcohol 120%.

That being said, is Alcohol the best choice for somebody like me, who just wants to make backup images of their games for storage? I'd like a "one stop shop", rather than downloading five different programs that do different things. Currently I use A-Ray, and Alcohol.

I just want to pop a game disc in, and create the image. Then I'd like to be able to burn a DVD or CD of the image to play the game. Is this as easy as it sounds?

Two Alcohol-specific questions: first, how much CPU/RAM does the program take up? I noticed if you want to run games off of virtual drives, you need to have Alcohol running in the background. Does this cause a performance hit? Also, even when I stop Alcohol, and I don't have it start when Windows boots up, the virtual drives are still there (and I have "remount on restart" off). Is there a way to stop that from happening? I thought I disabled Alcohol from starting.

Finally, is there a big difference these days in drive hardware, and success rates? I have a Sony DVD +-R/+-RW, and some off-the-shelf CD burner.

Thanks in advance.

You do not need have Alcohol running to make use of the virtual drives. The virtual drives are devices in your system and are present regardless of Alcohol running or not.

The remount is image based not drive based. If you have remount on reboot checked it will remount the last image back in to the virtual drive. Its like leaving the disc in the cd drive and rebooting.

If you don't want the virtual drives there all the time, open up Alcohol and change the number of drives to 0 and they will disappear.

Thanks for thre response. So the virtual drives are not really Alcohol related. How, then, are they removed (if I remove Alcohol)?

So then my remaining questions are: is Alcohol the best choice for someone like me that just wants to backup my games, and does hardware really make a difference (I have a Sony DVD burner, and a TEAC CD burner).

Thanks again for the help.

i can't answer your game questions, but the drives ARE alcohol related. alcohol puts them on your system. alcohol however does not need to be running in order to utilize the virtual drives (this explains why the drives are there when you have disabled alcool frm running on sartup)

when you do remove alcohol be absolutely positively sure to unmount all images from your virtual drives then go into the options and set the virtual drives to "0" before uninstalling the program...otherwise alcohol is a you know what to fully uninstall.

There are guides and tools all over the alcohol forums (the official forum that is) on how to uninstall if you forget this step.