

Restoring data from broken optical media - java-man
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=134704&WT.mc_id=USNSF_1

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pronoiac
This reminded me of someone retrieving data from a Cray hard drive with custom
gear:

[https://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-
archaeology-a...](https://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-archaeology-
and-hackerspaces/)

It's cool seeing research into this.

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java-man
Ha ha, this is so cool. Thank you.

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java-man
Quote:

"If a disc is broken in half, you've still got 99 percent of the data still
there," Gogolin says. "The media is quite elastic and the data is pretty much
intact up to the cut line. There is, of course, a region that is destroyed
near where the disc has been cut. But for most part, you didn't destroy the
data, you just made it unreadable because you can't spin the disc."

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ams6110
Quick way to destroy a CD or DVD if you don't have a shredder is to pop it in
the microwave for a few seconds.

I have been gravely disappointed by the durability of optical media,
particularly DVDs. At least in terms of resistance to accidental damage, in my
experience video cassettes were far superior.

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gnud
It wouldn't surprise me if your video casettes lost far more "bits" than your
DVDs, but, being analog, it's not nessescarily noticable.

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stox
One of the reasons LaserDisks are so durable, they're analog.

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pronoiac
Ooh! And if you use parity encoding, like par2, that might be totally
recoverable! Cool!

~~~
duskwuff
You don't necessarily even need that. There's some error correction built into
the disc already.

