The era of the CD drive is not quite over yet
I’m talking to a friend about a CD that I think I own. I never owned many CDs and gave most of them away (I think) in the noughties. But I kept this one. At least that’s what I thought until I searched my entire apartment and basement.
I find a whole box in the basement with a few floppy disks, two iomega Zip media and around eighty CDs. There are a few audio CDs, a few official purchased CD-ROMs from grab tables from the late 1990s (Monkey Island, “Picture Encyclopedia of Eroticism”), but most of them were burned by me or others. And even labeled, so you can guess that they get interesting data: backups from 2002 and 2003, photos and videos that other people took and gave to me along the way, audio recordings.
But I have often read about the poor durability of self-burned CDs. You had to write on them with the right kind of pen and then store them very carefully so that they would last maybe ten years. My CDs were lying around somewhere in my shared office between 2004 and 2011 and then in my damp basement. Ideal storage conditions would be cool, dark and dry. Two of the three conditions were met.
I check the prices for used external CD drives on eBay: For 18 euros I can try out whether some CDs are still readable. I buy a drive and pick it up in Berlin the next day.
The last external drive I owned was the size of several laptops stacked on top of each other. Aleks Scholz bought it sometime in the noughties because he thought his laptop didn’t have a CD burner built into it or something. But because one was installed, it lay unused with me for a few years. After that, his trace is lost.
The new drive is pleasantly small, weighs perhaps 100 grams and even has a USB-C port:
Before buying, I spent some time googling which drives would be most successful at reading old, half-rotten CDs. Since opinions differed and all the discussions were several years old, I didn’t come to any conclusions and ended up buying one.
At the time of writing, I’m not quite done with it yet… I wanted to write “scanning” first, probably because it feels like a digitizing process – copying the CDs to the SSD in my laptop. But so far the 18-euro device has been able to read and copy all but a single CD. It seems to be very patient with reading errors. There are photos on a CD, each about 8 MB in size, with the poor device making noises like it’s grating vegetables, lasting several minutes per photo. But in the end it works, and it may be my last contact with a world in which the handling of data makes noise.
When it comes to scanning, er, copying, I enjoy the fact that storage space is no longer as scarce as it was back then and I can copy everything to my laptop SSD without any worries. But like every time I think this thought, a warning from my operating system appears on the same day: Of the 500 built-in GB of my laptop, 1 is still free, I should please do something about it as soon as possible. Now this isn’t an insurmountable problem, I have a lot of USB sticks and a lot of cloud storage in various locations, but it does mean that I have to think of a strategy for where to save this new old data. And I would have to sort them somehow by importance and not just by type of data like I would like to do. Because that’s tedious, I’ll write this post instead.
I get advice from the technology diary editor as to whether I should throw away the CDs after copying the data. “No, don’t throw it away,” says Oliver Laumann. Then he jokingly suggests that I could burn the things worth keeping onto new CDs so that they will last another 22 years. And I really could, because the new drive is also a burner. But then I just decide to put everything back in the basement at the end of the copying process. The climate there seems to be good for CDs.
(Kathrin Passig)