Old Media: CDs and DVDs, Floppies, Old Hard Drives and Video Tapes — Why Their Recordings Slowly Fade, How to Read What No Longer Opens on Modern Computers and How to Preserve Family Memories

In the 2000s, photos were burned to CDs and DVDs, documents were kept on floppies and USB sticks, weddings and family videos were shot on MiniDV and VHS tapes, and the old computer with the family archive has been sitting on the balcony for ten years. It feels as if it's all in the cupboard "just in case" and can be looked at any time. But when that time comes, it turns out the new laptop has no disc drive, the disc won't read, the old hard drive has a strange wide connector, and the VCR is long gone. Above all, many of these media are slowly but irreversibly losing what's recorded on them. Let's look at what happens to old media and how to preserve what's on them.

CDs and DVDs: not forever

Recordable CD-R and DVD-R discs store data in a layer of organic dye that breaks down over time under light, heat and moisture. Cheap discs burned at home sometimes last only 5–10 years. Add scratches, a peeling reflective layer and so-called disc rot, where dark spots appear around the edge. The first signs are a disc that reads slowly with errors, some files that won't copy, or photos that open with stripes. The sooner such discs are copied, the more can be saved.

Floppy disks

Floppies store data magnetically, and after twenty or thirty years many no longer read completely. Computers haven't had floppy drives for a long time, so you need an external USB drive. Floppies often hold old documents, theses and programs — and even once the files are read, their format may not open in modern software.

Old hard drives

Computer hard drives from the early 2000s connected via a wide IDE connector that modern motherboards don't have. Laptop drives from those years also used a different connector. Reading them requires adapters or specialised equipment. Drives that have sat unused for years may also fail to spin up: the lubricant hardens and the heads stick. Repeatedly trying to start such a drive can damage it, so valuable old drives are best handled carefully, taking a full image on the first attempt.

Video and audio tapes

The magnetic tape in VHS, MiniDV, Video8 and audio cassettes demagnetises over time, sheds, sticks together and grows mould, especially in damp rooms. VCRs and cameras for playback are becoming rare, and a faulty machine can chew up a unique tape. Tapes are digitised on working equipment with careful preparation of the tape, and the result is saved in modern formats.

Outdated file formats

Even once the data is read, a problem may remain: documents from old word processor versions, databases from old accounting programs, photos in rare formats, video in codecs modern players don't support. They need converting to common formats while programs that can open them still exist.

How to save a family archive from old media

• Don't put it off: every year reduces the chance of a complete read.
• Keep the media somewhere dry, cool and dark until they're digitised.
• Don't repeatedly try to read a problem disc or run a VCR with a suspect tape.
• Once transferred, sort the files by year and event and label them.
• Store the new digital archive by the 3-2-1 rule: on a computer, an external drive or NAS, and in the cloud.

What our technician does

1. Goes through your box of media and assesses its condition.
2. Reads CDs, DVDs, floppies and old hard drives on suitable equipment and recovers files from damaged media.
3. Arranges digitisation of tapes on working equipment.
4. Converts outdated file formats to modern ones.
5. Assembles a single organised archive and sets up reliable storage for it.

A real example

A family from Didube brought in a box of two dozen DVDs with wedding and childhood photos and an old 2004 desktop PC. About a third of the discs read with errors, and the computer's old IDE drive didn't spin up on the first try. We carefully imaged every disc, recovered most of the photos from the problem ones, and read the hard drive on specialised equipment without repeated power-ons. The result: about 18,000 photos and videos sorted by year, on an external drive for the family and in the cloud, plus a copy on a USB stick for grandma.

A separate category is memory cards and the internal storage of old digital cameras, phones and music players. Old cameras often used card formats for which it's hard to find a reader today, and feature phones kept photos and text messages in internal memory that was accessible only through proprietary software and cables. If such devices still switch on, copy the data off them as soon as possible: batteries and electronics degrade over time, and at some point the device will simply stop starting. And don't forget relatives' old laptops and computers, where photos and documents have piled up for years. Before throwing away or giving away such equipment, make sure everything has been copied off it — we regularly see cases where the only copy of a family archive went to the scrap heap along with an old desktop PC.

Call a technician

If you have old media with important recordings, don't put it off — we'll help in any district of Tbilisi. Learn more on our data recovery, hard drive recovery and USB flash drive recovery pages.