Restoring data from broken optical media

https://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-archaeology-a...

It's cool seeing research into this.

"If a disc is broken in half, you've still got 99 percent of the data still there," Gogolin says. "The media is quite elastic and the data is pretty much intact up to the cut line. There is, of course, a region that is destroyed near where the disc has been cut. But for most part, you didn't destroy the data, you just made it unreadable because you can't spin the disc."

I have been gravely disappointed by the durability of optical media, particularly DVDs. At least in terms of resistance to accidental damage, in my experience video cassettes were far superior.