How To Perfectly Protect Your DVD/CD from Future Damages – A Must Read Guide For Every DVD/CD Collectors

DVD, CD and BD media keep their data only for a limited period of time. And the data starts to degrade slowly. It might be possible to get back some files on the DVD’s or CDs but in case of one single big file of some 650 MB or like wise things become hard. Even if a small part of that file gets unreadable we lose the whole file. You might have got errors such as “Cannot copy file: Data error (cyclic redundancy check)“ / “Cannot copy file: Cannot read from the source file or disk” like wise.

The invasion Flash Drives and portable hard disks have still not affected the market of CDs and DVDs and the latter are still the most widely used storage mediums. Their cheap price is the main factor behind this gain. DVD’s and CDs are cheaper but they lack one defect. DVDs and CDs gradually degrade with time. In the earlier days i used to take backups of my important data to CDs and keep them safely (almost at a dust proof place). I thought that even after long time my data would be safe. My PC’s hard disk used to work 3-5 hours during those days. So i thought that it would be safer to store and Keep the data in CDs rather than keeping on my Hard Disks. But when i tried to read the CD after a very long time but every time it failed. The CDs were not able to read except very few.

But there is happy news for all. There is a way to Protect DVD, CD or BD Medias from future damages. We can still recover the data stored in them very easily.

Thanks to dvdisaster. Dvdisaster will help you to recover the data’s stored in old CDs, DVDs etc. dvdisaster is one nice software that helps us to recover data from DVDs, CDs etc. dvdisaster makes this possible by integrating some error detection and correction codes along with the burned data. So even if some read errors have developed the data will be completely recoverable. The data recovery will be possible even if the DVD, CD or BD gets scratched or gets errors due to its oldness. dvdisaster reads the original DVD or CD and then creates an error correction file which consumes a 15% of additional space. For e.g. if a CD of 700MB of data is taken it needs approx. 105MB of space for creating the error correction file and a 4.7GB DVD file needs an error correction file of approx. 700 MB space. When the DVD, CD or BD get’s scratched or encounter readability problems or errors, then dvdisaster will make use of the error correction file to correctly recover the data from the scratched DVD, CD or BD.

How to Use dvdisaster to Protect DVD,CD or BD

1. First insert the DVD/CD from which needs to be protected.


2. Run dvdisaster and choose the correct DVD/CD and from File click on Select Image and give the destination to save the image file.


3. Again from File Select Parity File and give the location to save the error correction (.ECC) file.


4. Selection the option called Read see in the right pane of dvdisaster. This will take some time so go for a cup of coffee ad relax.


5. After the reading process gets finished click Create option to create the ECC file.

How to Use dvdisaster to Recover  DVD, CD or BD from Read Errors

From the above mentioned steps we have successfully created the error correction file. Now whenever you have read errors with your DVD, CD or BD and not able to copy the files from them properly, just follow the steps below.

1. Run dvdisaster and locate the DVD/CD and click on Read.


2. Now just choose the ECC file present in the DVD/CD and click on Fix. You can burn the image file in ISO extension to a DVD/CD.

What if i haven't created the Error Correction (.ECC) File before ? I have a very old DVD/CD with me.

I am sure at least some of the users (may be most) reading this post will have this question in their mind.

dvdisaster can also be used to recover the contents of a damaged DVD/CD even when if you havent created the error correction (.ECC) file before / if no ECC file is available. Only problem is that the data recovery chances are less without the error correction (.ECC) file

dvdisaster will create an image file by reading the entire disk by skipping unreadable portions / damaged parts and then tries to recover the missing data from the DVD/CD by scanning then repeatedly.

And the best of the best dvdisaster is free and it is available for Windows, Mac OSX,Linux and Unix.

Download dvdisaster