10 Steps to Avoiding PC Disasters: Day 6
PC Disasters Day 6: Optical Disk Problems
Many companies claimed early on that optical disks were virtually indestructible. But actual usage shows that they are actually quite fragile, and that you really can’t rely on them for more than 5 years, many of them will fail before that time. When your disks get scratched, it usually results in a loss of data…so make sure that you take care of them properly by storing all your optical disks in cases or places where they aren’t stacked on top of each other, but make sure each disk has its own case or protective sleeve.
Also, it is wise to purchase the highest quality disk you can afford, as the dye and foil on these disks is much better than budget disks, and will provide you with the best reliability you can get. In some cases it is worth making sure you backup valuable data to magnetic (hard drives) media as well. A tool called ISO Recorder can help you accomplish this task. Just install the program and put the disk you want to backup into the drive, and then choose “creat image from CD”. When your CD image is created you can use it in place of your actual CD if you use Daemon Tools, which allows you to create a virtual drive CD drive that you can assign to y our ISO image.
When you find yourself with a scratched or damaged CD/DVD, you will need to try and rescue the data. There are many CD repair kits that will actually try to polish out the scratches, but we recommend you try and retrieve as much data as possible off your CD first in the event the polishing actually makes things worse. You can also use cotton wool if the scratch is just an abrasion and the underlying foil isn’t damaged. You can sand out the small scratches by gently treating the scratched area in circular motions.
Remember to always have 2 backups of everything if you can, as this provides redundancy in the event of hardware or disk failures. Yes it take a bit of extra time to do this, but the thought of losing your valuable data will certainly motivate you to go to great lengths to protect it!