How can you be sure they are completely unreadable? No offense but in the right hands it can probably be done. I hope you didn't just chuck it all.
You know what they say (sorta), "Hindsight is the often the best sight". Basically, looking back at what you could have done the in the past is easy, but it is hard when it comes to thinking ahead. Overall, whats done is done.
I knew that since I was 15. I gave all my games and mp3s to other to copy, even if they didnt like them, just in case.. sorry to hear of your loss but DVDs are shit for backup, really. I tried to trust them in 2005 but abandoned them for everything but crappy movies. HDD/Tape/MODisk ftw if you're really into backing up stuff.
I'm in the precarious process of having a number of hdd's full and I know I have to back them up. - It took the loss of a 1tb drive (with about 450gb of data on it) for me to realise this. This is my single goal over the next few months... and I should've done it a long, long time ago. Always keep a backup of a backup > otherwise if one things goes wrong, it's lost. I give dvdr's a shelf life of no more than 10 - 15 years at best. I also had a similar situation where costly discs rotted but the cheaper one worked fine - although, ultimately, I would still say it's a lottery in the end. Good luck, that's all I can really say.
About 2 months ago I got 4x 2TB HDDs in a media server in RAID 5 for security. It gives me 5.5TB of backup space for all kinds of things, and it would take two drives to fail before I replaced the first failure for me to start losing anything. It's the only way to go really.
FYI. RAID is not a backup solution, just a serviceability solution. I've seen data lost due to either a controller failure (if that media server is a store bought, such as HP, then it uses fakeraid) or even through one hdd failure.
Yeah. One dodgy blown PSU and all your RAID drives could be dead. Currently I've got 2x500GB in a 500GB array, 2x300GB in a 300GB array, and 1x1TB external which is disconnected unless it's being used for backing up. It's about as close as I can currently get to secure.
Then perhaps I should have added that this machine mirrors everything I have on my computer which is the primary data store. It's a Thecus N4100Pro - http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=10&pid=77&set_language=english. Both power inputs are connected to separate surge-protected loops.
I actually think that if people doesn't start "mass warezing" discontinued consoles games and share many things will be irrimediably lost in a few years. And this is going to be extra true for 3do, saturn, cd-i and all the cd based consoles that started only lately to be "mass shared". The rarest games might became those of normal prints, but little fame of gaming value that everybody thrashed away, or not so successful region-only releases.... If copyright would sleep after a reasonable time (10-15 years) people could come out and make preservation archives before it's too late.
I never trust dvdr or cdr, I keep mirrored hdd copies... sorry to see this happened. I would say if the top coat has flaked off, the dye in the disc should still be readable if the topcoat is replaced. Worth a try.
With large USB / Firewire portable HDD's getting cheaper and cheaper, i don't see a point of making backups on DVD-Rs. For a long time, i decided to simply forget DVD-R existed. Sometimes they get corrupted in less than a day. It's interesting how DVD-R never became good. I have old crappy brands CD-Rs that work to this day! Plus, i never had problems with CD-R burners / drive, but i'm on my 3rd DVD-R burner / drive..
Sounds like you got lucky with the CDR... I went through a few. That said the last one I bought back in 2002 and it's still going strong, while 3 DVD burners have died in the interim (all Plextors, which flies in the face of popular opinion on their quality).
