CRC problems... solved!

If you're like me who clicks on the shutter button hundreds of times during the day when you're on vacation, it would be inevitable that you may have to back your files up in some way. Until a few months ago, I used to keep a copy of all my images on my hard drive at home. The time came when disk space became scarce and I had to store my images elsewhere. DVD recordable discs came to the rescue. They're cheap, easy to store, and virtually lasts more than a lifetime.

There is, however, a problem with this kind of media. If you get a cheap disc to write on, you may end up having more Cyclic Redundancy Errors (CRCs) than you can handle if you retrieve the images on another computer. I don't know why, but some drives seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to data retrieval. Don't get me wrong, though. I check every disc that I burn with a data integrity checking software and everything up to that point turns out OK. The problem starts when you take the disc, pop it into another machine, and start getting your images back. Window$ can't seem to read the files properly, hence the CRCs.

I've experienced this fairly recently when I tried to retrieve my old photos from a DVD-R. CRCs abound like ants on steroids munching on a leftover Cadbury chocolate bar. I tried using different softwares to get my images (which were sentimental, by the way) back, and failed. I then came across a keeper of a software. I recovered all files from my disc without batting an eyelash.

It's called AnyReader.

Here's the original quote from their website

Effectively copies corrupt data from any type of disks or erroneous connections if standard copying methods fail. AnyReader supports resumed downloads from the remote PC if the connection was broken during the copy process (especially useful for unreliable Wi-Fi networks).

AnyReader is great for copying files from scratched CD/DVDs or defective floppy/hard disks. Normally when your computer is unable to copy files from a damaged disk it will abort and delete the part of the file it has copied. AnyReader will continue copying the file right to the end; any data that hasn't been recovered after several retries is replaced with blanks. This will allow you to effectively read every byte of information that can be read at all.

Note: Using AnyReader is safe and risk-free. The software does not write data to your original disks, but saves the recovered data to a new folder that you specify.

And here are situations where AnyReader might be able to help you out

• Your CD/DVD drive can't read bad, scratched or trashed disks;
• The standard copying method fails because of an error, such as "(Bad CRC) A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) checksum error occurred", "Cannot read from the source file or disk", an unknown error or a bad disk;
• You have 2 bad copies of a file that you would like to put right;
• You can't download a file across wireless LAN because of a bad connection;
• And many more of those...

In my case, I found myself in the second situation.

Don't throw away those CRC-laiden discs out of sheer frustration just yet. :)