DVD Part 4 and counting

Today Alan convinced me that I had to face my fears and buy a spool of disk. I headed over the the local electronics discount place then the office supply place when the first had almost no selection.

From what I had read Sony disks were considered safe, good and generally available so I bought a 50 pack of their AccuCORE DVD-R's and headed to the testing ground.

I put together a folder that weighed in at 4.0 Gigs and dropped it in Toast. I choice burning speed as "best", began the process and waited. At the 1 second left mark, a write error appeared and Toast crashed.

Hmmm... Maybe it's something I did?

I restarted the computer and began the next burn, this time at "2x", I waited and watched and Guess what happened...

As pissed off as I was I figured the drive it's self was most likely fucked and I decided I should consider cutting my losses, pull the hard drive out and wack the fucking computer with my chain mace, which my wife apparently hid.

I networked the soon to be destroyed eMac with my Mirror Door and transferred the test folder.

Next I happily popped in a fresh disk and hit all systems are go. I leaned back in my chair and felt pretty satisfied. I imagined what I could do with the eMac's carcass to ensure it's total suffering. As the burn came to an end the same error notice appeared, crashed Toast and made me see blood red.

I now began to wonder whether these drives didn't like the dyes being used on the DVDs. I put in a CD-R and burned it on the eMac, I did another I verified that they matched the original files... 100% fine.

FUCK!!!!!

I'm now going to research compatibility issues with DVD-R brands while I debate buying another hard drive and returning this batch of disks.

DVD-R part 3: UPDATED

In my last post on this subject I had said that I had tried to contact the company that manufactured the disks. Since that time, I have not received a response. Here is my note to them:
_________________________________

I've been a TDK user my whole life. I have never experienced any issue with your cassettes, DAT, CD-Rs in many personal and professional applications.

A few months ago I bought one or two spindles of 1-16x 4.7GB disks.

Over a period of time I burned, verified and tested about about 150 disks of both data, audio and video successfully I placed them back on a spindle.

When I went to retrieve a disk I discovered it wouldn't read. I became concerned and started testing all the disks. about 100 or so disks were no longer readable. They were tested on 5 computers with different OS' and the video disks were tested on two DVD players.

I have researched this topic for two weeks now and have not found any information on disks being created, tested as working, stored and tested as not working within a three month period.

As a professional who has used optical media for some time, I am at a loss as to 1. what could have possibly happened 2. what to do to possibly retrieve the data.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could forward this around the company and see if you can help find a solution.

All disks were burned on two Macintosh's running up to date versions of Roxio Toast. The numbers on the disks read CMDR47G-CTMW01-104 3115

Thank you for your attention.
_________________________________

Alan suggested I post in the forums at doom9.net which I have done. Although I have not found a solution, I have at least read a fair amount of interesting information and the people on the forum have been supportive.

I found a Japanese application called DVD Media Inspector which allowed me to locate who actually manufactured the batch of disks. I was able to do decoding by comparing the data with information on this site.

Meanwhile the handful of disks that aren't totally dead are dying fast. They take minutes to read and many give errors if I try to copy them and I am still searching the house for all disk from that batch. I am at a standstill as to whether I will be able to trust DVD back up again.

DVD-R part 2

I am now thinking that this is a bad batch of DVD-R's which has me really worried about any disks that still work. I guess I may have a ticking bomb on my hands.

I sent an E-mail to the manufacturer because it's total bullshit to have 100 or more disks go bad.

I still have no idea how the disk went bad and because of this whole ugly situation I am wondering what the point of DVD burning is if one can't count on it holding.

I need a OS X app that can inspect these disks. So far all I can do is watch my computer spit them out.

The DVD-R vanishes

It's been a fairly long time since I started using digital media in my day to day life.
First DAT that ADAT then AIFF & SD II files on the Macintosh. Amazingly I had no problems with digital tape, few issues with audio files on the computer.

A few weeks ago while my wife was out of town I decided to toss in a DVD-R that I had recorded a concert on. I had left the last 100 or so burns on the spindle, which I knew was lazy and stupid, my lack of labeling was bad enough but this was a new low.

When I popped the disk in the computer spat it out. I tried again.. Spfitttttttt!! out it shot.
Shit!! No error message from the computer, no visible damage to the DVD-R. I was panicked. I started to go through every disk on that pile, all were bad.

After several hours of testing about 100 DVD-R disks on 4 computers running three OS' and two DVD player I realized something horrible had happened. But what was it? All good media, slow burns, verified and played back...

I have many disks here and the only ones that went bad were left on a spindle. I searched the Interwebs for clues but found no exact matches to my situation. I began calling experts and no one could come up with an explanation.

It then dawned on me... I have Pro Tools sessions and video work for myself and others backed up on DVD-R. I don't know where to begin.

This page talks about care for various optical media and is useful but does even hint at what I'm dealing with. I looked at various data recovery applications but didn't see one that looked good and was OS X. I don't know whether that speaks well or poorly for my chosen platform.

One thing I have seen over and over is that long term data storage should be done on hard drives, which leaves me to wonder what the fuck DVD-R's are for exactly. The other interesting thing is the CD-R is much more trust worthy and rugged, this is most likely because it's not trying to squeeze so much data onto such a small space.