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There is a definite limit to "recovery" of lost data, no matter WHAT the media involved, that is why the term "BACKUP" becomes an important issue. Anyone who's ever had a hard disk go out knows the terror involved - "what files are on THAT disk?" "where did my stuff go?", etc... Victims of disasters know a fire or a flood or other weather can wipe out everything in it's path... there's a disk recovery site that has some amazing pix of what they've successfully recovered from computers after "total" disasters...
I've recovered a few hard disks with issues myself, but the 1's and 0's must still be there and not overwritten or "faded to obscurity".
My understanding of the issues with burned disks is that the burnable layer just sort of "fades out" as it ages, meaning you may as well have a disk of "2's". My thinking is that this is no different from a photo (or a piece of furniture or anything else!) left out and exposed to light/heat cycles over time. These disks are also read by a laser, AKA light/heat... ANY media can and will degrade over time when exposed to the "wrong" conditions.
It's a part of life that things wear out, go out of tolerance, break and generally fall apart eventually. The best one can do is try to keep the degradation to a minimum and backup your ones and zeros on a semi regular basis... Your odds improve if you've got dual or triple redundancy and preferably an offsite backup solution if your data is really valuable.
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December 9th, 2009, 02:59 PM
