Just thought I'd share with the list a few comments about transferring
images off CD's...
I have 547 CD's here with film scans on them, dating from 2000 to 2004.
I just popped disk number 417 into the CD drive of my scanning computer.
This is my second run at this - I spent several weeks copying disks last
spring only to discover a subtle defect in my CDR drive meant that the
copied images were messed up - the OS did not detect a problem and the
images looked fine as thumbnails, but at full size they had many
(hundreds) of small black blocks a few pixels high and maybe 50 to 100
pixels long...
I replaced the drive but didn't get back to this till mid October. Over
the last six weeks I've left the computer on and have dropped a disc in
whenever I am sitting here or even just around the house. It takes 5
minutes to copy a good disk using xcopy, 11 minutes using xxcopy. Some
disks take longer.
The advantage to xxcopy is that it will not stop on errors - it will
chew through the disk and salvage any files that it can. Xcopy is fast
but will just stop when it can't read part of the disk.
Loss rate? So far about 15 of the disks have been bad, almost all of
those are one brand (Prime Peripherals) from 2000. Aside from those,
I've only had a bad file or two here or there. Some time ago one my cats
pushed a 100 CD stack off the desk (I guess I wasn't paying enough
attention to her) and three of those disks cracked when the package fell
and are unreadable.
I'm looking forward to getting these images onto a USB drive - I have
just under 280 gigabytes transferred so far.
At this point the only casualty of this process (aside from a lot of my
time) is the newest DVD drive in my main computer. Yesterday when one of
the cracked CD's would not read in the scanning computer I put it into
the main computer to see if that drive would do better. The drive spun
up, made a sound like a bad washing machine entering the spin cycle, and
then made an enormous CRACK that sounded like someone smacking a cane
two handed overhead full swing against a table. The drive was totally
jammed - even the paper clip in the little hole would not open it. I
hopped out to an office supply store an bought a replacement - the old
drive sounds like it is full of gravel. I think the cracked CD shattered
into smithereens.
So - to try to contribute to the knowledge base -
-- With the exception of the Prime Peripherals brand, all of the CDR's I
have have proven to be reliable. There is a small failure rate for
individual files here and there, but otherwise they have been OK. All of
these disk are at least 7 years old, some are over 10 years old. I've
heard comments that CDR's more than 5 years old are not reliable. I'd
say, not 100% reliable but more or less OK.
-- Command prompt Xcopy is by far the fastest copy methodlogy that I
tried (this is a 32 bit WinXP machine). Xxcopy (freeware) is more
thorough and can salvage files from bad disks (i.e. it dos not abort on
the first read error) but is slower. (I did my first 200 CD's with
xxcopy - that is 16 hours more copying time than xcopy. I use xcopy now,
and revert to xxcopy if I see an error (requires actually reading the
copy screens - something I don't like to do.)
OK - so now I am at disk #427 - since i started this post I fried some
fish, set the table, made a salad, had dinner, did the dishes with my
wife... all the time sneaking up here to copy another disk whenever
possible. Copying disks is slow work... like posting...
MCC
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