How to backup old burned CD's (music and photos)?

[FIRE Realtor]

Hi,

Hoping there is an easy answer to this for someone (me) who is not very tech savvy!  I have a bunch of CD's that are ten to twenty years old, some of burned music very valuable to me (live shows no longer available)  and also family photos from the digital camera era.  I know these aren't going to hold up forever and am looking for a way to back them up.  My laptop doesn't even have a CD drive anymore...

Also some of the CD's are already "glitchy" - like skipping songs and photos that don't show up (last I tried when I still had a CD drive) so is there a way to save once already damaged?

Thanks so much for any advice! 

[hdatontodo]

You can buy a $20 usb cd/dvd reader from Best Buy

You can copy them to an internal or external usb hard drive.

Sent from my SM-G991U1 using Tapatalk

[reeshau]

You can also just get an external DVD/BR drive, and connect it to your laptop directly, whether you save locally or to a cloud service.

Heck, even my new gaming tower didn't come with an optical drive.

Do you see scratches on the glitching disks?  You can polish it out with something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Innovations-SkipDr-Motorized-Repair/dp/B0041A3JR6

I use CDEX to rip my old CD's.  Almost all of mine are commercial, but it will also check public databases for Metadata to tag the files with.

[Toorg]

Reeshau is on point. Though I would say rip what can be ripped before polishing in case something goes wrong.

I have ripped every CD in my apartment and my parents house to hard disk, with backups in 3 locations.

[Just Joe]

I have a pair of NAS units. Not expensive on the used market. Internal hard drives x2 provide redundant backups w/o the perpetual subscription cost of cloud storage. However, naturally - you could lose the NAS to theft or disaster.

I use free Kubuntu Linux to rip/burn DVD/CDs using K3b. There are another 6-7 other free software options in Kubuntu. Just try them out until you find the right fit for your needs.

If you are just copying files from an optical disc to a hard drive or network storage - free RSYNC is pretty great. You can use the command line version or there are front-ends that provide point and click interface options.

I recently backed up my portable hard drive to the NAS. Figured out the RSYNC command from online guidance, made a document to copy/paste from. Pasted that into the command line and it just goes to work. Or use the point and click version. Hard drive just contains my music, hobby info, some documents etc.

[Samuel]

Don't dally if this stuff is really important to you. Burned CD's in particular are not stable for long term storage. I had hundreds of burned CD's back in the early 2000's (I worked in a library, it was easy to accumulate music) and they all went bad over time.

You'll need a CD drive and likely some software capable of continuing to read the data around all the bad sections. A Linux based overview: https://secnigma.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/a-guide-to-recovering-damaged-and-rotten-cds/

I'd start with a CD drive and trying to copy them the normal way but if you hit errors you might need to get recovery software or find and pay a specialist to save what they can.