eNews Exclusive: Ounces of Prevention, Pounds of Cure: Protecting and Repairing CDs and DVDs

Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
October 2007

For those of us who owned hundreds of bulky 12-inch scratchy LPs, this was a godsend: a handy 4 3/4-inch disc that never wears out! A lifetime of high fidelity! It'll sound as good as it does now decades later! Brilliant! Didn't quite work out that way, huh? We've all had compact discs, and, since 1997, DVDs and their data-oriented offshoots, that have become inoperable due to scratches - or worse. So what can be done to fix them? And when is it time to call in the pros?

Let's start with home disc repair kits, which typically come in two basic flavors: motorized and hand-crank. Provided that a scratch isn't too deep, the hand-crank units, such as my circa-2000 Skip Doctor (http://tinyurl.com/3a7gmc) from Digital Innovations can get the job done, but it's tedious work. It requires slowly cranking through two 360-degree orbits of the disc and requires all of the drudging arm strength of a hand-operated ice crusher.

In contrast, the new Memorex OptiFix Pro (http://tinyurl.com/pgp9t), which retails for about thirty dollars, is infinitely less physically taxing. Shaped like a portable CD player, it has a motor powered by an AC adaptor, keeping your arm from wearing out, so that it can continue to hold a camcorder.

In order to differentiate the OptiFix's two primary functions, there are two buttons on the unit marked CLEAN and REPAIR. Similarly, the OptiFix comes with two sets of pads to insert into the unit and two containers of fluid, which are color-coded to match the pads: yellow for cleaning and green for repair. The repair solution, in a green-colored toothpaste-style tube, is a bit more abrasive than the cleaning solution, as it has tiny granules of sand in the solution to buff the disc.

The yellow-bottled cleaning fluid and the microfiber cloth of the less-invasive cleaning pads are designed to remove smudges and fingerprint oils. Memorex recommends that OptiFix users first use the repair pads and repair solution, unless you're sure you need only a light cleaning. Pressing the repair button on the OptiFix runs the unit for about a minute and a half. Then pop in the cleaning pads and the cleaning solution, and press the cleaning button, which runs the OptiFix motor for about 45 seconds. Then the entire repair process is complete. Well, hopefully at least.

Probably not Ghostbusters. But what happens when a scratch is so big that a kit such as Memorex's OptiFix can't do the job? It's time to call in the pros. I can vouch for such services. Back in the late 1990s, I stupidly stored virtually all of the drafts of my magazine article on a single writable CD-R. One day, its data failed to load.

Horrified, I ended up sending it off to a data recovery service for repairs. They were able to extract all of the data from it (and then some: tons of hidden earlier drafts of articles were also recovered). But not all discs are repairable. The consensus seems to be that, if a scratch is deep enough to damage the disc's metallic data layer, or worse, if a disc is physically broken, you're very likely to have just added to your beer coaster collection.

"Basically, the data layer is a layer of dye that's laid down onto the polycarbonate surface of the disc," Deborah Hernandez, marketing communications manager for Memorex says. "There's sort of an imprinting process, if you will, that creates grooves. The grooves actually have little pits and high areas that, in a sense, represent the zeros and ones. They sort of get punched out as the laser goes around and interacts with that dye layer."

DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com) has worked to repair discs and hard drives submitted by firms ranging from 20th Century Fox to LucasFilm to the rock group Nine Inch Nails. John Christopher, the firm's senior data recovery engineer, notes, "Once the plastic substrate is broken, it creates all kinds of problems and then certainly the reflective layer itself is also damaged in the process." The result, as Memorex's Hernandez puts it, is "a permanent removal of that data configuration in the dye layer. So at that point, you have basically a fatal error with your disc." Whether it's caused by nine-inch nails or not, if a scratch is deep enough, it can take out too much data to make a disc repairable.

However, less catastrophic errors can often be salvaged by professional data recovery firms such as DriveSavers. For CD and DVD repairs, they, and similar firms use an expensive high-compression machine that allows them to recoat a disc's surface, to literally rebuild the plastic surface on the disc itself.

These firms can also often salvage a disc that became unreadable due to an error caused by computer's writable disc drive. "If a session didn't close on the disc, then what we have to do is to make a copy, a low-level bit-for-bit image copy of the disc," Christopher says. "Since DVDs are a write-only medium, we therefore have to make an image copy, so that we can go ahead and work on the directory structure of the disc. From there, we extract the data from it. So there's still hope, even in situations with logical corruption."

In addition to products such as Memorex's OptiFix and services such as Drive Savers, Roxio claims that its Toast 8 DVD burner for Apple (http://tinyurl.com/nph2a) can attempt to restore and recover files from discs with minor scratching or damage while copying.

Look for other CD and DVD burning products to integrate similar recovery features. In the meantime, Deborah Hernandez of Memorex recommends paying attention to how your discs are stored, to avoid having to repair them in the first place. She notes that proper disc storage starts with a seemingly innocuous decision: choosing the right case to hold the disc. While jewel cases have been safely holding CDs for a quarter of a century, that doesn't mean that they're also the right case for a DVD. Compare a CD case's hub, which consists of dozens of molded plastic "teeth," to the smoother design of a typical "flipper" DVD case's hub. The DVD case's hub is designed to cause less friction and less interaction with the inner hub of a DVD disc.

Hernandez says, "This is because a DVD is basically two bonded layers of plastic, but they're not bonded all the way at the center hub. So it's very easy to put stress on that inner hub area and cause the two hubs to either separate or to crack or bend.

"So it's just really important," Hernandez adds, "if you're storing a DVD, that you put it into a special DVD case, versus a CD jewel case. And then the other option, of course, is to just put it into a paper or polypropylene sleeve, which puts no stress on the inner hub."

In addition to protecting against scratches, the other reason for the sleeve or case is to block light, which can penetrate into and break down the dye layer of the disc.

A disc's lifespan is also influenced by its environment. Hernandez recommends that CDs be kept in a temperature between about 39 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit and about 20 to 50 percent relative humidity, and it seems safe to assume that a similar range is acceptable for DVDs. Needless to say, avoid storing an important disc inside a parked car for an extended period.

"All of those environmental factors are really important," Hernandez emphasizes. "And obviously, so is handling a disc properly: holding a disc by its edges, and not putting it down on a table and then sliding it over to the edge to pick it up. Those kinds of things that we all kind of carelessly do - even I do that! But you know that every time that you do that, you risk damaging your data layer."

Finally, always back up important data and video. Burning a backup disc or archiving to a hard drive is infinitely cheaper than employing a data recovery service, which, as we noted above, can't always work miracles if a disc has sufficient damage. It's especially important to back up and duplicate a previously damaged disc that is playable again.

While the original claims regarding the immortality of the CD and its offshoots were clearly overwrought, there's no doubt that they can provide decades of enjoyment with just a few simple precautions. And there are numerous options available should a disc suffer minor failures.

Besides - other than purely for nostalgia, would you want to go back to LPs and VHS?

Ed Driscoll is a freelance journalist covering home theater and the media.