Do you have water damaged digital media?
Have you ever found your DVDs in an icy cold bath?
Has your city or town been recently devastated by a major flood?
If you answered "YES" to one or more of the above questions, you may have already won!
Read on for details.
Have you ever found your DVDs in an icy cold bath?
Has your city or town been recently devastated by a major flood?
If you answered "YES" to one or more of the above questions, you may have already won!
Read on for details.
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First you must have water damaged and/or dirty discs to begin with, or else this whole thing just won't work.
Ok, assuming you have the discs, carefully remove them from their cases. If they are stuck to the paper inserts, remove the whole thing, do not try to remove the paper at this point.
Ok, assuming you have the discs, carefully remove them from their cases. If they are stuck to the paper inserts, remove the whole thing, do not try to remove the paper at this point.
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As a user of digital disc-form media, I have a lot of foreign movies, home movies, backups, concert footage, bootlegs, and other irreplaceable things. I have a lot of movies I've bought at film fests that were indie press, a lot of music from bands that don't exist any more. For these things, I have made backups on some laptop sized hard drives and put them in my safe deposit box.
For everything else, there's Transmission!
However, in some cases the disc would be valuable, and if I had time to protect them I would try to get everything in a watertight bin. But in a case like Katrina, where nobody knew they were in for such a problem, there is little choice but to attempt recovery.
Sometimes the ability to save something you might otherwise see as a useless exercise is a way to deal with the concept of losing pretty much everything you own. Whether or not homeowner's would pay for it is not really relevant to the fact that you can get something back, and poke Mother Nature in the eye.
Treknowlogy makes a good point later on about limited editions and other non-replaceable discs.
Some people can't afford insurance, and after a flood the backup ISP's may be down ect.
If you want to do an instructable on how to back up your data online, I'm sure some people will find it useful.
If you have something you particularly value, then you need to catalog it, have it valued by a professional, and then purchase additional "all risk" insurance to cover it.
Most companies set a limit above which you need to declare items, but they exclude things like TVs and appliances that everyone has. Laptops and bikes, things that are at risk of being stolen away from the home, are often mentioned explicitly in the policy document. Anyway, obviously things like jewellery should be valued but for other items a receipt is fine or they will just take the market value. "New for old" is standard these days so for e.g. a laptop they will get you one of equivalent spec.
This is way OT now but CDs should just be replaced. They paid out for the CDs in my car when the CD changer was stolen.
thankyou for your question, but you must realize that there is far more in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, horatio.
YEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
I have CDs and DVDs that will never be re-issued. What insurance company can or will replace them?
What about 3000 video tapes many of which contain material that will never hit the air waves again? What about extremely rare vinyl that has/will never be transferred to CD?
I, for one, am thankful that someone has given valuable data on recovering discs.
Just a note regarding CD backup. I am an audiophile with an enormous collection of music CDs spanning many years of collecting, and spent some time researching backup solutions.
The process i use involves archiving every CD to hard disk, using a freeware product called EAC - exact audio copy. Extraction process only takes a few minutes per CD, looks up an online database for the title/song list, and also creates a music database on your PC which is easily printable and can be formatted to any requirement. I use the FLAC format, which is a industry standard free lossless compression that shrinks the 6-700meg down to 350-400meg...not a huge issue now that drivespace is so cheap.
The beauty of this is i can dump a copy to my laptop across the home network, create and drop mp3s onto a pen drive for travel or in car entertainment, or just use my NAS as a jukebox (or create playlists) with no need for CD changes.. it is a simple process to dump the FLACs back to CD in standard format if you need to.
My desktop machine runs raid mirrored drives, and i have a secondary machine which works like a NAS (network storage) - so losing everything is practically impossible. I use a similar method with digi photos, ensuring there are archived copies available on the lappy.
The most obvious benefit is, when the floodwaters start rising just grab the laptop and run!
This works great for recovering LOST data by creating an ISO image and burning a replacement disc of the damaged disk from the ISO IMAGE it is LIMITED in its trial version but to buy it is only $29.99 I am not in ANYWAY affiliated w/ this product or the website BUT I DO use the program it has saved my sanity due to possible lost of IRREPLACEABLE photos and data.
http://majorgeeks.com/IsoBuster_d4717.html
DVD's on the other hand are DOUBLE LAYER polycarbonate. so much more protected but density of data is higher so it takes far less "damage" to render them unusable.
the only way you could read that disc is if the disc was "NOT" full and the flaked off part was the portion of the disc NOT utilized to store the data you extracted.
a DVD is difference. it has 4 layers. Polycarb - Data - Polycarb - Label
a CD is 2 (3 really) layers. Polycarb - data - Label but the data layer and label layer might as well be the same layer. IE if it flakes off and you can "SEE THROUGH" that portion of the disc the data in that portion of gone.
You can restore some discs well enough that they will temporarily be readable. Discs you've recorded yourself are likely to be much harder to recover - although there's no harm in trying, since that data will otherwise be lost. But as they are "burned" and not pressed, they will be much more difficult to recover - and will fail much more quickly afterwards. These are the discs you want to work on first, and the moment you are able to read that disc, you need to copy it to a new, undamaged disc if the data is important to you.
As for commercially recorded discs, unless you are not insured, I'm not sure they're worth bothering with. Even "out of print" titles can be purchased used, and you're much better off getting new discs than going to all that work only to have the discs you "saved" failing prematurely. Of course, there is no guarantee some of the discs in the used market haven't been exposed to water, either.
Of course, you could keep making copy after copy. But in another flood, those copies would be much harder to recover - if you could do so at all - and you'd also be out the cost of all those blank discs. Sure, they're cheap, but even pennies add up...
Some DVDs were totally destroyed while others were just fine.