Do you backup your important data in DVD or CD? Well I do. I always
think that a CD or DVD disc have longer life span than a hard drive
because my computer is turned on at least 16 hours a day while the disc
is never used unless I accidentally deleted the data from my hard drive
and need to recover it from the backup disc. One thing most of us
always overlook is that our backup disc is normally kept away for years
in a store room and totally forgotten about it until we need it. Well a
disc also have life span and CD, DVD and BD media keep their data only
for a finite time (typically for many years). After that time, data
loss develops slowly with read errors growing from the outer media
region towards the inside.

If you have a lot of small files in a disc, you can still copy part of
it out but what when you have a single 700MB file on a CD and a very
small part of it is unreadable, the whole file is gone and there is no
way to recover it. You will get error messages like “Cannot copy file:
Cannot read from the source file or disk” or “Cannot copy file:
Data error (cyclic redundancy check)“.
Good news is there is a way to make sure that you can still recover
your data even if you have an aged or damaged medium. It’s something
different than making another full backup on a backup.



dvdisaster stores data on CD/DVD/BD (supported media)
in a way that it is fully recoverable even after some read errors have
developed. This enables you to rescue the complete data to a new
medium.

dvdisaster creates an error correct file (.ECC) from your original
disc and it requires 15% of additional storage. So for a 4.7GB DVD
disc, you’ll need approximately 700MB for the ECC file. When you have a
disc with read errors, all you need to do is launch dvdisaster and
create a new ISO image file from the damaged disc using the ECC file.
dvdisaster can NOT make defective media readable
again. Contents of a defective medium can not be recovered without the
error correction data. So you need a backup strategy and error
correction data must be created before the medium fails.
Here’s a simple guide on how to use dvdisaster to create an error correct data.

1. Download dvdisaster from the link at the end of this article and install.

2. Run dvdisaster and enter the CD/DVD that you want to backup.

3. Go to File and Select Image. Set where you want to save the image.

4. Go to File and Select Parity File. Set where you want to save the ECC file.

5. Click the Read button at the right hand side of the program.

6. After finished reading, click the Create button to create the ECC file.

Now you have the ECC file. When the disc have read errors and you
can’t copy the files out, simply launch dvdisaster, click Read to
create the image. Then select the location of the ECC file and click
Fix. The image file in ISO extension will be the file that can be burn
to a disc. dvdisaster is free and it works on Windows, Linux, Unix and
Mac OSX.

[ Download dvdisaster ]