Kuch Khayaal/some thoughts

I have many of my India photos on a slightly damaged DVD.  To help recover them, I got evaluation versions of two programs, BadCopy Pro and CDRoller.

The DVD has 4 session on it.  The data I need rescued is in two folders on the fourth track.  After letting each software have their time (over 24 hours each) with the DVD, I wanted to see how they compared so I could take the best version of each photo from whichever program rescued it better.

I had two folders, one for each program.  I simply sent the contents of the recovered file folders to a text file (dir > filename.txt in the command prompt) and opened those files in Excel.  Now I had a list of the file names and sizes each software was able to recover from the DVD.  I did a Vlookup in Excel to compare the file sizes between the two programs.  I made the simple (but I think sensible) assumption that the larger file would contain more data and hence be a more complete photo.

The results were as follows:

BadCopy Pro recovered bigger files than CDRoller, without exceptions.  They ranged in difference from 2 bytes to 0.5 MB.  Based on my little real-world test, then, I would have to say BadCopy Pro does a better job than CDRoller at rescuing corrupt and missing data.