Good backups gone bad

ARE YOUR PHOTO ARCHIVES SAFE? IT COULD BE TIME TO TAKE A LONG HARD LOOK AT THOSE OLD BACKUP DISCS.

CD-R DISCS WERE once a very popular way to make a safe copy of files. They’re cheap, they’re easy to label, and they’re easy to store – why not put all your old photos on a CD-R, tuck it away, and then look back on it in 20 years? It’s certainly a lot smaller than a photo album. Well, there’s a very good reason not to do that: CD-Rs (and, by association, all manner of recordable discs) are extremely vulnerable. Many, including our own art department here at Windows Help & Advice, have found that older discs can suffer what’s commonly referred to as ‘rot’. It’s not the same process as, say, rotting wood, but the term is apt.

On a CD-R, your files are stored on a very thin layer of foil which sits on the top layer of the disc – the same layer you’d generally write on to mark its contents. Over time, the adhesive between that top layer and the plastic section of the disc can deteriorate, causing the foil to separate or even flake away, leaving that disc completely unreadable. Writeable optical discs can also suffer if they’re stored in the wrong environment. Long exposure to direct sunlight, for instance, can effectively erase portions of their stored data since the foil is literally made to be affected UV light. Higher quality discs may last a little longer, but we’re definitely coming to the end of the CD-R era.

So what can you do? First, if you’re still using optical discs for backup, you’ll need to change the way you look after those precious files. Switch to using USB storage, take advantage of some form of online storage, or preferably use both to ensure that at least one survives in case of disaster. Second, dig out those old discs now and copy their contents to different storage. With any luck most of them will read just fine, but for those that don’t, all is not lost. It’s possible to use the likes of PhotoRec (see right) or the paid-for IsoBuster ( to scan even seemingly unreadable discs and recover at least some of their contents – it’s a last resort, and often very slow, but it could be lifeline your discs need.