CD/DVD’s are not considered very good option if you are looking to store your important data for the future like your last holidays digital photos you snapped. The main reason for this is that when ever you keep your CD’s in a stored location and by mistake if you drop it, there are chances it can get a number of scratches, making you losing all your important data. Generally the Audio Players at your home or Car can run these CD’s with some tracks being skipped because of errors but in case of computer/laptop’s CD Rom’s they are very delicate and cannot read all the data and directly gives a error[cyclic redundancy check error] when you try to copy the data from the CD/DVD to any other storage.
What is cyclic redundancy check error?
Its a simple terms this is a message you will read whenever you try to transfer data from one storage to another and when there is a problem in reading the data while transferring the message pops up. Its not just the case while transferring data but can also come up when you have corrupted zip files which come up when you have incompleted downloads. When ever there is a error on the DC/DVD Discs the disc is read again and after several attempts even if it fails then you get this error, generally you can try to clean the CD/DVD disc, clean the Drive, check out loose cables etc to make sure the problem is not just on the Disc and if this problem continue you are in chances of losing your important images and digital videos from these damaged CD discs.
Tools to Repair scratched CD’s DVD’s Discs :
There are several tools available on the web using which you can recover lost photos or any data from your damaged CD/DVD Discs. Check out CDCheck 3.1, a quick and small software which can help you in checking out your CD/DVD disc and recover all the data from it, In case the damage is huge then it changes to Recovery Mode and makes a full recovery of the data and helps you in repairing the missing fragments. Also the software is available for free of cost for 30days which can help you in times of emergency situations.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
I agree that though the CDs and DVDs are not a very good option for sharing/backing up the photos, but still it is one of the most easy and used source.
Apart from the use of the above software, I have often read people using toothpaste, or Vaseline to cover the scratches for a temporary fix.
As for sharing/distributing/backing up, the online backup seems the best option. With many services providers, like Flickr, Picasa etc one can make the invaluable pictures risk free.
July 15th, 2008 at 4:25 am
With USB Pen Drives getting cheaper the use of CD for storage or data transfer has reduced a lot.Software recovery is not always guaranteed.As pratyush said the tooth paste tricks really works in repairing scratched CD/DVD’s. I was successful in able to getting data read of a CD with many scratches.
You can check out the procedure for that here http://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Scratched-CD
or check out this video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNOO4nGlcmw
August 17th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 5:10 pm
I dont think one should back up data on cd’s now
We have better options like external hard drives
Blu-ray is a good option but i dont have any idea about it..
but for sure, external drive is a good option