CDs and DVDs are discs that, over time, become damaged, scratched, dirty and thus become illegible . As a medium for storing data, files, documents, music, videos, films, photos and video games, DVDs and CDs are certainly useful and also inexpensive but they are not always as reliable as one would expect.
The lifespan of CDs and DVDs generally varies between 2 to 15 years so they are a risky backup medium.
However, you still cannot completely give up on DVDs that become very useful, for example, when you want to copy videos shot with your camera or mobile phone and films, burning them on a DVD to be able to watch them on television.
After reporting the best free programs to recover data, files and photos from damaged CDs or DVDs, let's see how to attempt to recover videos from illegible DVDs or CDs from your computer .
Until a few years ago the answer would have been quite obvious because there was a free program that worked very well for recovering videos and data from illegible DVDs or CDs: ISOBuster .
This is a paid software that creates the ISO image of the damaged CD, making it burnable on a new disc.
The free program most similar to ISO Buster is ISO Puzzle, a very simple tool capable of creating the ISO image with videos and data of the damaged CD or DVD inside, which also works with DVD movies.
From another article we see the best programs to open ISO images that can then be burned with the famous ImgBurn program.
ISO Puzzle has not been developed for some time.
Other small but powerful free tools to recover videos, photos, music and any other type of data, creating the ISO image of the restored disk, are Dataminer and DVD Disaster .
A program designed for the specific recovery of AVI, MP4, MKV or DIVX videos and MP3 music on a CD or DVD is Get My Back Video which attempts to restore multimedia contents found on CDs, DVDs and other optical discs.
The recovery takes place for individual files, therefore an ISO copy of the CD is not created but simply the extraction of a specific video or music is attempted.
Get My Video Back, however, manages to read those DVDs and CDs that Windows sees as illegible, lists them in a list and allows their recovery by making a copy on the computer's hard disk.
The program displays the copied bytes, the errors, the skipped bytes, the recovery speed and the elapsed time.
It does not work with original DVDs and does not recover DVD movies but only videos copied as files from the computer.
The options are available from the File menu -> Settings from which you can also decide to cut the videos that have reading errors and which, therefore, are not fully recoverable.
It is also possible to activate byte mode to save all the readable bytes of the video file.
The best, free file recovery program that you can find today is Recovery Toolbox, a tool that recovers damaged files of any type on CD, DVD, HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs .
CD Recovery Toolbox manages to find those files that have been lost due to physical damage to the disc (scratches, chips, and so on) or as a result of bad or inaccurate recording and burning.
The program scans the damaged disk and shows a list of recoverable files and folders.
Before using these tools I will advise you to read the various practical methods of repairing a scratched CD or DVD.
