A Technique to Recover Data from Damaged/Scratched CD/DVD Media
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Have you ever faced the situation where you had some valuable data stored on a CD/DVD and later you found that CD is physically damaged(for example scratches) and data cannot be copied back from it. It happened with me a couple of times in the past. But I discovered a useful utility that allowed to recover data from the my damaged CDs. In my case I was not able to completely recover all the data because of the excessive scratches on the CDs. I used the recovery utility Unstoppable Copier for recovery of data from CDs. But it can be used to recover data from not only optical media but also from hard disks or any other storage medium, incase if you have damaged source with some valuable data on to it. There are some shareware applications available such as Bad Copy Pro that can do this task as well but I think Unstoppable Copier should serve the purpose for most of the people for free.
Interface of the application is not very complex. You will have to provide the source from which to recover the data and the destination folder where to store the data. When you hit the copy button the process will start and all the valuable statistics about the current recovery/copy operation will be shown in bottom part of the interface. In the settings tab you can access a slider that allows to set a balance between the Best Data Recovery(slow) and Fast Data Recovery (may not recover all possible data). You can also set some other useful options in this tab such as resume partial files,Auto Skip damaged files and include sub-folders. Actually this program will try to copy a file even if a a part of it is damaged, so it will not abort the operation entirely as windows built-in file copying mechanism in this case.
Please note that it may not be able to copy all the data from the damaged storage medium without errors but you can tinker with the slider in the settings tab to achieve a balance between the accuracy of recovery and the time taken. Also your chances of success with the recovery of data may also depend upon the type of data stored on the damaged medium. If data consists of audio/video files than it will not cause much harm if there are some data corruption errors because it will only effect the file in a very small part and all the remaining file will play fine. In contrast to this if you are trying to recover an executable file then even a single integrity error may prevent it from executing it properly after recovery. It means that given number of integrity errors may have varying degree of effect on the type of file being copied from the damaged media. This utility may prove to be a heavenly gift if you find yourself in such a situation. You can download the Unstoppable Copier from the official website.
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IF the damaged disk is a movie and has a single file, then it may be difficult I guess to recover it.