How do I recover photos from a backup CD?

Question

Three weeks ago I burned a back up CD to save my photos while my PC was being repaired. My PC was having many problems and now I think that when burned the CD I might have burned some problems along with it. I can no longer view what is on the CD. The first time I went into win explorer I saw a few photos and then they dissappeared. The time from clicking on the drive to the time something came up must have been a half-an-hour. The few pictures that came up were not retrievable. I stopped this proceedure but when I decided to go through this again, nothing came up. I have 4 such CDs one of which has my daughter's wedding pictures. We have tried different programs that is used to retrieve but none of them worked. I am afraid I lost perhaps a couple thousand photos. Any one have any ideas out there? I would like to save these photos.
Thanks

Answer 1

Boy do I feel for you!!
Same thing happened to me with a new computer that I put all my pics on, and burned backup CD's .. and I burned 2 CD's of each, because I believe in redundancy, and I kept them in dust covers in a plastic CD case in a safe place in my office.

The computer died after a week .. I took it back and had to just exchange it .... I figured I had all my photo's and breathed a sigh of relief .... until I discovered that NO CD reader would read any of them!!! And yes, I had checked them on the old computer to make sure they burned right, and on the old computer, they were just fine.

Happened 5 years ago, and I am still livid ... I lost 3 CD's of photo's, some were prize-winning photo's from contests.

Unfortunately, I cant help you retrieve them ... but I sure hope you find a way. Also, you might want to invest in one or even two external hard drives to store duplicate photos on ... that is what I did, besides putting them on CD's.

Wish you the best

Answer 2

You probably had put the CDR's in the sun. In that case, you can't get them back. (UV-radiation.)
Normal ('pressed') CD's can handle sunlight much better. CDR's can't.
What you can still try is several different PC's (with different CD/DVD-players). If that works, maybe you can repair your own CD-player by cleaning the laser lens.
In future, i recommend to only use TDK scratchproof DVDR's WITH UV-protection (always check the backups after burning!!), AND backup the pictures to a non-maxtor USB-harddisk. Disconnect the USB-harddisk after your (monthly) backup. If then the lightning strikes your PC, the USB-cable can't burn the USB-harddisk. Don't use wireless backup media; hackers can then hack your network or delete your backups.
Nonetheless: never leave your UV-protected media in the sun; never let them handle by children. Don't put them above a radiator or other hot things, don't put them in the kitchen or other moisture environments. DVDR/CDR's are NOT nearly as good as manufacturers do us want to believe.
Another type of backup: give a backup to some family-member. Let him/her put the backup on the harddisk, make them readonly or deny write/delete-rights for others then the 'administrator' (when using the NTFS-filesystem).


Another possibility: if you have an old CD-burner, not all media are good enough for that burner. Never look at the price, only look at quality when it matters backups.

As a test you could burn 2 CDR's. Test them both right after burning by copying the whole content to the harddisk. Put one a few hours (or days) in the sunlight, keep the other one in the dark. Then retest.

Answer 3

You may insert backup CD to see whether you can recover photos from a backup CD. If it's not there, you may try some photo recovery software which can recover lost deleted or formatted photos from computer hard drive. See this guide
http://tinyurl.com/windowsphotorecovery1