Optical media recovery includes the recovery of data from Magneto Optical Disks, Phase Change Optical Disks, Ablative Optical disks, CD and DVD.

Traditional Optical disk came to the fore during the 1980s when hard disk was lower capacity and very expensive. It also cam with WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) options that appealed to people who needed to store data for many years. CD, then DVD, entered the market and took away the low end of the optical market on price and familiarity, we all had CD and DVD for domestic purposes so using them for data had a certain comfortable feel.

Most of the problems with CD and DVD relate to damage, they are not particularly robust and tend to get treated badly. CD in particular also has problems across some brands with recording degradation (some early CD suffered complete recording fade a short time following recording).

Optical disks are less prone to damage, they are protected by a plastic case, but can suffer problems relating to defect management failures and read errors that make access to data impracticable. Also with WORM disks the data cannot be stored using a hard disk file system as sectors cannot be updated, there has to be an additional level of organisation to manage the data and any corruption of this can result in data loss.

For further information about how to get help with the recovery of data from your CD, DVD or Optical media click here.