How can I make copies of my software discs? For example, the discs that Adobe Creative Suite comes on or the Mac OS X and extra Applications discs that came with my Mac.
Good idea--it’s always smart to make a backup of important discs like those for your personal use. With the disc in your optical drive, open Disk Utility. Then click the disc’s name in the list on the left (one level below your optical drive), and click the New Image button. A dialog appears where you can name your disk image and choose where it’s saved. In the dropdown for Image Format, choose DVD/CD Master.
We made a disk image of our Lego Batman disc so we could mount the image and play the game without needing the actual disc in our drive.
Click Save, and Disk Utility will create a disk image that ends with a .cdr extension. This is an exact copy of the optical disc in your drive, so you can double-click the image to mount it, and it’s just like you’ve mounted the disc itself. If you want to burn a copy of the disk image to another optical disc, open Disk Utility, click the Burn button, navigate to the disk image you just created, and click Burn.
