On Thursday 28 April 2005 16:02, Joe Button wrote:
On Thursday 28 April 2005 14:24, Joe Button wrote:
Hi.
I've got some people coming round tonight to watch a film I've got in mpg format on a data DVD. Unfortunately I've just discovered I can't read beyond about three quarters of the file. Does anyone have any idea how I could recover the rest of this file, or at least most of the rest of it?
Ok, panic's over now - I managed to read the whole file using a different DVD drive.
The joys of digital. I had the same problem a few years back on a bad batch of CDs. Each one had on it a single video file; I was never able to recover them.
CDs and DVDs are not reliable media; they're both designed for recording analog media, which is very tolerant of errors. When using them for backup it's better to save a lot of small files than one huge archive. That way if an error occurs - a scratch maybe - at least you can get at most of the files. Archive formats are very intolerant of even the slightest error rate. Which leads me to ask: is there a way of archiving that will tolerate blocks of errors, (the usual pattern for disc damage)?
-- GT