Is Your CD Feeling Itchy?

How to Burn and Maintain Your CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD

USB drives have replaced the way we deal with data portability. We all know that CD’s are delicate and prone to scratches. The only way to keep the CD’s in working condition for maximum amount of time is to handle them with “paranoia care”, something what i call. It’s almost like the CD’s are always itchy and will get scratched by somebody, someday or the other. Even though it’s zillion times rational to preserve data on CD’s rather than on the pathetic 1.4 floppy drives. Yes, even in the age of thumb sized terabyte capacity USB drivers, I’ve seen people still dealing with floppy drives with storage capacity of only 1.38 MB.

CD’s are used for many reasons and all of them serve a different purpose. But, when the CD’s are scratched, the chances of data loss increases and things can become difficult if the scratched CD’s are full of important data. In many cases the CD’s are non-readable because either the surface is damaged, stained or just full of finger impressions. The following are some basic tips that can and should be followed to ensure maximum data life,

CD Burning speed: Using good quality CD’s fir burning is essential for better data protection and storage life. One of the common mistakes made while burning CD’s is that the data is set to burn highest speed. If  the CD’s are burnt at a very high speed, say 48x which increases the chances of bad data on the burnt disk. It is advisable to burn the CD’s at a least possible speed say 4x or 8x to ensure  the data is burnt accurately. Why is it so? The answer can be found at Link 1 and Link 2.

Also, it is better to not multitask on a computer with average hardware configuration while burning CD’s. This because the CD burning process consumes a lot of RAM and is busy communicating with the data to be burnt and other concerned areas. If the user is performing some other task along with the burning process, it’s stresses the computer and may interrupt the burning process.

CD storage: It is advisable to store the CD’s in proper CD cases and in an area with a room temperature not less than 20°C (68°F) Greater than 4°C (39°F) to avoid any damages occurring due to incompatible temperatures. As recommended by: Archival Storage Facility—Recommendation for storing CD’s and DVD’s together.

Using Cologne for cleaning: If the CD surface is greased or stuffed with finger impressions, clean it with a soft cotton cloth with few drops of cologne. Make sure you apply the cologne on the cloth and wipe the disc “from the center to the outer surface” in single down motion. Rubbing the CD surface back and forth will successfully invite scratches.

Data Recovery Method: If your CD has reached a stage where you encounter “Cyclic redundancy error” a.k.a damaged enough to avoid you from accessing the data, it’s time to use a Data recovery application. ISO buster (Windows and Linux) is very good at recovering data from damaged disks CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD. There have been cases where i had successfully recovered all data from a bad CD. And sometimes, i could recover a part of the data. It all depends on to what extent the surface has been damaged. But, it’s better than just dumping the CD away with total data loss. Isn’t it?