Messiah

[kooldraco]

The messiah2 is definitely the best chip out there right now. The messiah2 will not damage your PS2 once is already installed, however installing it is not for the inexperienced.
Hardware needed of course is a CD-RW and a DVD-RW drives.
Clone CD and Nero are the best tools used to backup CD based games. To backups DVD based games a lot of people use Prassi Primo and Record Now Max, I personally use Nero for both CD and DVD based games.