Same, safest way. I do it with all of my games which i use, another good tip, Don't lend your disks to friends!   Btw i thought Birth of the federation was free-ware so it's perfectily legal for them to have it up on there site. The source code was released and everything.

BotF? Blank of the Blank? Battle of the Federation? I dunno, it's probably really obvious and I'm just not getting it. Anyway, I haven't lost my A2 CD yet, mostly because all my CDs are so scattered over such a small area that it's quite hard to loose anything.

Hmm I haven't been able to get an image of A2 to work...it still asks for my actual CD...

And I keep all my games in tip-top shape and condition.  And if I like a game and I know it will soon disappear off of shelves, I go out of my way to get an extra copy.  With that said, I got an extra copy of Starcraft and A1, but unfortunately, by the time I got around to A2 (recently) it disappears from shelves  

I suggest once you get a copy of A2, copy an image of it (.iso) onto your hard drive, then burn that onto a CD.  Then put your original in a safe keeping place and just used that backup copy.  Yes what I have said is legal under the Digital Rights Millenium Fair Use Act.