Yet another problem

So, here’s yet another problem we didn’t use to have.

I decided to make this a digital housecleaning day, and put to use a hard drive from this stack of 80gb drives I bought for backup. My first priority was to gather my assignment work and duplicate that.

My Whitman College RAW files are backed up solely on DVDs. I started to copy the first disk onto a hard drive, only to encounter a series of copy errors, and something called a "cyclic redundancy check." I Googled the term and found out I was in trouble.

Apparently I have a DVD with some bad sectors. I first tried cleaning the disk, which didn’t make a difference. Google led me to a link to a program called CD Check, which can evaluate and recover damaged data on a CD or DVD disk. I understand very little of the jargon in the instructions—details on "Hash files" and the like. But there’s a button labelled "Recover," and that’s good enough for me. It’s running now and has found about a hundred bad files to fix. It looks like it will take over 4 hours to process the disk.

The cause of this trouble could be that the drive I am using to read my DVD is a replacement for the one I used to burn it in the first place. Whatever the cause, it makes me now mistrust my entire DVD archive.

Comments

[Christian]

Data archiving is a drag - your post just reminded me to archive a bunch of stuff, thanks.

But as a parralele, i used to pull out slides that were scratched after a trip to the lab or the color seperator, not as often as bad or lost data - but I swear there is a parralee for everything.

That said I'm glad it's just a hobby and I have empathy for you going through it as a way to making a living.