this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
767 points (99.2% liked)
Memes
45536 readers
187 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Those were legit, though, you can resurface optical media to allow it to be read again
Yup. The data was encoded on the back of the plastic disc. So long as the “label” surface wasn’t scratched you can resurface the bottom.
It was more common for commercial discs and some consumer discs to have the data layer sandwiched between the bottom surface and label layer, especially later in cd/dvd’s heyday, to prevent tiny scratches on the label or sharpie marks from destroying bits in the data layer.
There was still a wear layer below the data layer which could be resurfaced. So the services worked.
Commonly it worked by removing some material from the bottom wear layer to remove the damaged bits, so it didn't work forever. You would eventually run out of material to remove and trying to repair it would result in a catastrophic failure of the media.
Writable disks however, not so good.