Lifetime of a CDROM disk - Comments Page 2

Fred Langa had some thoughts on this.He suggested not using stick on labels on burned disks,that they tended to shorten disk readability life greatly.

I have a Skip Doctor and it works like a charm!

As a service to our user group membership we do keep computers up and running that use 3.5 floppies, CD, Zip, and SCSI removable like SyQuest, etc. Have saved many users from losing valuable files.

I had lost 1/2 a year of digital pictures and was just heart-sick, but thanks to your article, after just cleaning with mild soap and warm water, I was able to read it and copy them to a new disc. Will definitely remember your toothpaste suggestion. Thanks for ALL your worthy tips.

Just an update regarding Flash Drives. There was an article recently that mentioned that flash drives degrade over time at a much faster rate than any media type archive (tape, CDR, DVD, floppies, etc.) Just a word of warning if you are planning to use them for long term storage. Basically, the older the technology, the longer the archive life (i.e. stone tablets lasted longer than parchment/paper which lasted longer than magnetic media which lasted longer than flash media). My advise is to at least get printed copies to archive on acid free paper, especially pictures. Music files and videos are harder to archive, just try & look at your VHS home movies of just 10 years ago & check out the image quality. Even old movie film will degrade noticeably after just a decade.

Well, I have a question about a computer game. It is called The SIMS2, my brother an I used to play it ALL the time, however when we were finished we of course were lazy and forgot to put it back in the case. Now I would really like to play it again, but when I put it in the computer, it won't play. I noticed scratch marks on it, so I went online to see if I could possibly clean it and that would be simple enough to work. However it failed and I am really upset about this. Is there ANY way that I can possibly get this disk to properly work again? If so please give me some advice :)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Did you try all the ideas in the Repairing a Damaged CDROM section of this article?