How to Protect / Repair CD and DVD Discs

Now let us take a look at this condition. Imagine that you have a large quantity of CDs and DVDs where you burned your home-made movie, anime, short clip, or whatever file you wish to store as collection. How can you keep them in a good condition? If you got your CD and DVD discs damaged, how can you repair them? Here are some tips that will help you going through all the process to get the best result.

What factor cause shortening in disc’s life span?

Back to the fact, an investigation by a Dutch personal computer magazine, PC Active stated that some CD-Rs are unreadable in as little as two years, because the dyes in the CD’s recording layer fade. These dyes replace the aluminum “pits” of a music CD or CD-Rom, and the laser uses that layer to distinguish 0s from 1s.

When the CD is written, the writing laser ‘burns” the dye, which become dark to represent a “1″ while a “0″ will be left blank so that if the dye fades, there will be no difference in which it’s just a long string of nothing to the playback laser. In simple way, we can say that the best choice for us now is to store our valuable data in two copies. One as a stand-alone copy whiles the other one for playback.

Beside that, other factors which cause a decrease in disc life span are heat and physical damage such as scratch.

How to maintain our DVD/CD discs condition?

The first thing that one could practice to maintain the lifespan of CDs and DVDs are by not keeping them inside the optical or burner drive when he or she is not using them. This might sound simple but we cannot guarantee that all people have realized this. Actually when we keep the CD/DVD in our optical/burner drive, it will suffer from unnecessary heat as the operating system might order the drive to check for any CD/DVD disc every time during startup.

Burning in low speed such as 48X (for CD-R) will also reduce the chance of data corruption besides by concerning the brand of CDs/DVDs that we want to buy. Products from Imation works best for me. How about you? What brand of CD-R/DVD-R do you like to buy? Now let us head to what we are suppose to do when our discs are scratch:

What to do when CDs/DVD become scratched?

1. Firstly, buy a liquid-based CD scratch repair kit a local store. Try to get a soft, lint-free cloth, such as one made for cleaning eyeglasses, if your scratch-repair kit doesn’t come with that. A
2. Check manufacture’s instructions. Wipe across the CD, starting from the inside out in straight line. Never wipe in a circular pattern (common mistake). Repeat the process if necessary and allow the disc to dry. This method can also be applied to DVD disc.

If the method above does not work, consider this method as your last resort.

1. Instead of using liquid-based CD scratch repair kit, use toothpaste.
2. Rub the toothpaste over the entire bottom of the CD. Left it there for 1 minute, then hold the disc under flowing water and use “radial motion” to remove all the toothpaste. Finally, allow the disc to dry