Disc Rot and Workarounds?

[SaurusX]

I was going through my old burned DVD's (many from 10+ years ago) to compare what I had in the archives to what was available on Kametsu.  I came to find that many of my old discs are completely unreadable!  I even used multiple drives to check.  These are Taiyo Yuden-made Verbatim brand discs, so I didn't cheap out on media.  They simply have bad disc rot.

 

This is, of course, pretty distressing as I have a lot of video material that I was hoping to conserve for the long-term. I guess I need to move to a NAS setup?  What are other peoples' solutions?  As it is, I'm going through my archives, keeping what works, discarding (and hopefully replacing) what  doesn't.  It sucks.

[Koby]

Many years ago I utilized discs, but I found that regardless of brand, within a few years they all become mostly unreadable and spit out 'cyclic redundancy' errors while trying to transfer what was readable. So I completely stopped buying discs. Instead I opted to buy hard drives. When you actually price discs vs. hard drives; the hard drives are actually usually slightly cheaper for the same amount of space.

 

100 discs x 4.3 GB per disc = ~430 GB space = ~USD$25 when you catch a sale.

While a 1TB hard drive = ~USD$49 at regular price

 

The hard drives take up less storage space as well and can easily be swapped out with newer better releases constantly unlike the discs that require you to burn stuff on new discs each time.

 

As for reading discs that have gone bad; unfortunately I do not have any kind of working solution...

[SchallMann1978]

I've experienced disc rot with my CD-ROMs, before I purchased my first portable hard drive in 2008.  -The fact is, burnable discs are a bygone era, with digital and streaming media taking over.

You could try running them through a recovery program, but I highly doubt you'll get much out of them if you're experiencing CRC errors.  -My suggestion to you is to get a sizable, external hard drive, and preserve whatever you can from those discs.