CD has been wiped clean

Drinda

I research our family history and a chap made a CD for me with all the info, pictures and photos that I had collected, He made this about 2 years ago and I used it a few times at first, but I recently tried to make a copy to give to a family member and found that there was nothing on the CD, we tried it on several other machines but the properties say it is empty. Can someone please tell me how a plain CD/R can be cleaned like this and if there is anything I can do to prevent it happening again as it is going to be a lot of work sorting through paperwork to build all this info up again.
I asked in PC WORLD all they would say is "yes it can happen" well that was stating the obvious because because I have the empty disc, but they could not tell me why and how. The CD runs in HTML file format.
Thanking you Drinda.

weegie.geek

http://www.isobuster.com/

normal non-rewritable discs can't be blanked, but you can update the table of contents and mark files as deleted. The files are still there, just in a previous session.

ISOBuster should let you read the various sessions and get your data back.

A damaged CD can also appear to be blank, but give ISOBuster a bash.

And then start using more than a 20p CD to hold 2 years of work.

totalsolutions

Do you still have the cd writer that was used to burn the data?
Can you use that to read the info?
Any damage on the cd surface?

Viper_7

Cheap CD by the sounds of it. They don't last forever and some don't last very long at all.

Marty_J

Sounds like a case of CD rot to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_rot

You should be using good quality CDs like Verbatim to store important information. Maybe making a few copies and keeping them in separate places. There are also various places online where you can store things. Redundancy is a good thing.

asininity

Get a usb drive and store your stuff on that as well.

motorguy

Yes, there is an impression that info on CD's lasts forever.

Unfortunately it doesnt. Backups to multiple sources is the only preventor...

Drinda

Thank all for your replies and the info for isobuster and I can now tell my sons I have not lost my marbles.
Thanks again Drinda.