Since I got my canon dslr I've increased my Data storage requirements about 4 fold, quickly filled up an 80 gig, then a 120 and now 50 % of a 160 gig drive. I don't like large drives, and I like to have atleast 2 good copies of everything incase of drive failure, I don't want to loose some of my photo's.. Decided to get a little more organised and backup most of em to DVD and hard drive, setup a naming convention for folders by date/subject etc.. YUP I am making backup's

I like to have 2 copy's, removable media backup, and extra hard drive backup that I can stick in a fire safe somewhere else.

I started looking through some newspaper ads and a couple store websites, found a DVD +R/RW drive on sale at staples, went there to buy it and found out it was online sales only. I bought the next closest priced dvd r/rw that they had in stock at the store.. I didn't care if it had lightscribe or anything like that, it was just what I could afford at the time.

So onto my point... I just decided to see how well it reads damaged media... I have an old black sabbath CD that has scratches in the DATA side, on the top label, several scratches through the foil, caused by the cd slipping out of it's case and onto a upside down circuit board with all the soldered and clipped IC legs sticking up, all sharp n stuff... It's been a while since I've even looked at the disc.. The data side has a bunch of small evenly spaced scratches and pinholes through the shiny stuff... It hasn't played for a long long time due to my cd-rom drives, and discman not reading it....

I put it in my toshiba DVD drive today and it plays!!!! Hard to notice any issues in playback, maybe a couple little out of time cymbal crashes, something like that. Played through about 5 tracks and still didn't hear anything skipping. It's almost like it just mends the scratches together? pretty cool!