Which is the best way to back up my pc games. Is it better to just copy them from one cd to another. Or make an image file to my hard drive and then burn the Cue File?
Make an image file to the harddrive. But if there's no copy protection and you just need 1 copy, then on the fly copying is fastest.
When you beckup games you better know, before doing anything, if (and which) copy protection have been put on the CD. Daemons Tool website is very good for learning how do detect the protection schemes. Check http://www.d-tools.de/protection.htm There are also some applications that do that job (Clony, for instance). Remember that the protection scheme will define the proper read/write (e.g. CloneCD or Alcohol) settings. If you set them wrong you'll only burn coasters!!
I just burn the image to CDRW and test it out that way before committing it to CDR. If I can't detect the copy protection, at least I can "tinker" with the settings a bit.
You're right. Using a CD-RW is always a very smart thing to do. A second good advice is to always scan the extracted image with CDMage to check for corrupted sectors before doing anything.
