Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1vptkj0/my_experience_with_reading_data_back_from_optical/

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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/manzurfahim on 2026-08-16 10:29:19+00:00.

TLDR: Make sure to have enough optical drives if you decide to back up on optical discs.

I've burned about 200 optical discs before I moved to another country and finally got around to get someone to bring them here for me. They were stored safely in 3 album type bags. There are about 20-30 CDs (CD-R and CD-RW), about 50-60 DVDs (mix of DVD+R, DVD-R and DL), and around 100+ BD discs (25GB and 50GB). All are quality discs, all BDs and DVD DLs are verbatim, some Memorex and some other brands of CD-Rs and RWs. My burner at that time was a Plextor and an Asus drive. They were burned about 16 years ago. All discs looked clean and new, no scratches.

I have one ASUS BD burner and tried to read the discs with it.

It succeeded in getting the files out of a few CDs, some DVDs, and 11 BD 25GB and 50GB discs.

Managed some more optical drives, three DVD burner, two BD burner (supports 100GB), and one asus BD burner (older model, only supports up to 50GB), and a Samsung bd burner portable type.

End result: Managed to get data from about 80 discs in total using all the drives. So, using eight optical drives, I managed to recover 40% of the data from 200 discs.

I'll try and get a few more optical drives to see if I can recover some more. A lot of old games, music and movies are on the discs that are no longer available on the web.