CD Data Recovery Software

Mike

New member
Hi all

I work for a company that deals with large volumes of legacy multimedia data and storage formats. I have been tasked with trying to recover data from a few hundred compact discs that have been flagged as damaged or corrupted.
After a bit of googling I've managed to come up with the following packages that seem to be well regarded: Recuva, IsoBuster and Stellar.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these packages as its difficult to know what to expect without purchasing the software for their full functionality.
Being the experts, I would love to hear your opinion on these or if there are other packages that I haven't mentioned that would be good for recovering CD's specifically.

Thanks
Mike
 

lcoughey

Moderator
Mike":185yrhx3 said:
[post]13087[/post] After a bit of googling I've managed to come up with the following packages that seem to be well regarded: Recuva, IsoBuster and Stellar
Others can correct me if they disagree, but only one of those three that I'd hold with any regard is IsoBuster. The other two are best known for spamming the internet with fake reviews and recommendations in order to fool people into thinking that they are decent programs.
 

lcoughey

Moderator
LarrySabo":3pkp0qwg said:
Any bets on a new member suddenly chiming in with a recommendation for Stellar?
It certainly does seem like a great setup for a spammer to chime in...especially Stellar.
 

lcoughey

Moderator
I suppose that if you have a few hundred discs and are charging a reasonable rate each, the cost of the fancy machine might be worth the investment.

Assuming a few hundred discs to recover, with an average of 2 man hours per disc, even at $50/hour, that nets you $30,000. I'd be charging no less than $250/disc, if not $500/disc. Yes, I know that the client likely would decline my quote, but seeing that you have several hundred hours to commit to this project and assuming that you are only going to get paid for the successfully recovered discs, you need to make sure that you get paid for your time.
 

Mike

New member
Thank you for all the replies. From my test it did seem like IsoBuster was the most successful and advanced. Stellar does claim to "Repair Images" which I found to be a bit dubious, especially because this feature was locked behind a pay wall.
I have discovered that we do have a CD "cleaner" at another branch which I need to investigate to see if its any good but will definitely explore your suggestions if it isn't up to standard.

If anyone has any software suggestions that I didn't list I would be happy to hear them.

Thanks again.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
I've actually used ddrescue on occasion for CD recovery. It's not half bad at imaging around the bad tracks. I've found it to be much faster at working directly on the CD than even ISOBuster.

Then, after I get as clean of an image as possible I open the image file up in ISOBuster. That's gotten me pretty good results.

Also, try multiple different CD-ROM drives. You'll get different results with different drives. So some blocks that can't read in one drive might read in another. Using DDrescue it's easy enough to switch readers and keep retrying to image to the same file.
 
Top