Trouble reading burned DVDs written to high-quality media., A cautionary tale Options

[jkauff]

I have a collection of CDs that I don't listen to very often archived as FLAC files on DVD discs. The original discs are in storage, not easily accessible.

The other night I decided I wanted to put the Buffalo Springfield box set on my iPhone to listen to at work. I tried to copy the FLAC files from the DVD to a hard drive before making AAC versions for the phone. I have the box stored on a Taiyo Yuden DVD-R that's only been used once--when I archived the files. Two songs from two different volumes wouldn't copy no matter what I did. I used Nero Recover, and that managed to extract at least some of the data, but not complete files. I cleaned the drive laser. I tried CD/DVD repair fluid on the disc. Nothing worked. At some point, I'll need to dig the box out of storage and re-rip it.

I've always believed that using quality discs, stored properly, for backup was safe. Now I'm not so sure.

I think in the future I'm going to put each disc in a RAR archive with a recovery record, and generate a set of PAR files that I'll store on a hard drive. I never thought this extra level of protection was needed, but I'm a believer now.

Just thought I'd share for the benefit of anyone else who's using that same method of offline storage.

[greynol]

Did you try a different drive?

[jkauff]

Did you try a different drive?

Yes, with the same result.

[greynol]

That's too bad. My Plextor has a difficult time with discs it burned that my LG (or was that a LiteOn?) reads with ease.

[Fandango]

You could try dvdisaster. It'll create an image and it can make as many recovery runs as you like, augmenting the image with successfully read sectors. Of course, it's possible to use different drives on the same image.

Because of the possibility of deterioration of the information layer the moment I have found that software I was eager to add recovery data with it to my DVD "backups", if you can call this kind of medium suitable for backups.

This post has been edited by Fandango: Nov 24 2012, 21:38

[punkrockdude]

For albums I use par2 with MultiPar on Windows and PyPar2 on Linux with a recovery size of 10%. When I consolidate recording projects I put the project files in a rar file with recovery record. Sometimes I even use par2 for the rar files for extra security. It has saved me once, big times.

[Porcus]

I guess disParity could be used for parity protection? It is “snapshot RAID” without striping; downside is that updating is slow, but that's no issue for non-rewriteable media.