Raymond.CC Blog

Do you backup your important data in DVD or CD? Well I do. I always think that a CD or DVD disc have longer life span than a hard drive because my computer is turned on at least 16 hours a day while the disc is never used unless I accidentally deleted the data from my hard drive and need to recover it from the backup disc. One thing most of us always overlook is that our backup disc is normally kept away for years in a store room and totally forgotten about it until we need it. Well a disc also have life span and CD, DVD and BD media keep their data only for a finite time (typically for many years). After that time, data loss develops slowly with read errors growing from the outer media region towards the inside.

If you have a lot of small files in a disc, you can still copy part of it out but what when you have a single 700MB file on a CD and a very small part of it is unreadable, the whole file is gone and there is no way to recover it. You will get error messages like “Cannot copy file: Cannot read from the source file or disk” or “Cannot copy file: Data error (cyclic redundancy check)“. Good news is there is a way to make sure that you can still recover your data even if you have an aged or damaged medium. It’s something different than making another full backup on a backup.


dvdisaster stores data on CD/DVD/BD (supported media) in a way that it is fully recoverable even after some read errors have developed. This enables you to rescue the complete data to a new medium.

dvdisaster creates an error correct file (.ECC) from your original disc and it requires 15% of additional storage. So for a 4.7GB DVD disc, you’ll need approximately 700MB for the ECC file. When you have a disc with read errors, all you need to do is launch dvdisaster and create a new ISO image file from the damaged disc using the ECC file. dvdisaster can NOT make defective media readable again. Contents of a defective medium can not be recovered without the error correction data. So you need a backup strategy and error correction data must be created before the medium fails.

Here’s a simple guide on how to use dvdisaster to create an error correct data.

1. Download dvdisaster from the link at the end of this article and install.

2. Run dvdisaster and enter the CD/DVD that you want to backup.

3. Go to File and Select Image. Set where you want to save the image.

4. Go to File and Select Parity File. Set where you want to save the ECC file.

5. Click the Read button at the right hand side of the program.

6. After finished reading, click the Create button to create the ECC file.

Now you have the ECC file. When the disc have read errors and you can’t copy the files out, simply launch dvdisaster, click Read to create the image. Then select the location of the ECC file and click Fix. The image file in ISO extension will be the file that can be burn to a disc. dvdisaster is free and it works on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OSX.

[ Download dvdisaster ]