[In a previous article], we examined the volatility of data burned to optical discs, concluding that CDs or DVDs might not be as ideal for long-term storage as previously thought. Because the loss of data integrity is caused by physical limitations of the media itself, one solution is to go virtual.
The average cost of an internal hard drive now runs about 15 cents per gigabyte, which translates to a lot of storage bang for your buck. As technology improves, hard drive prices go down, and storage capacities go up. That’s a win-win by anyone’s standards and all the more reason to consider using hard drives for archiving data previously stored on optical disc.
Now you just need a way to transfer a stack of discs onto your hard drive. One of the most efficient ways to capture the entire contents of a CD, DVD or Blu-ray data disc — whether commercial quality or homemade — is to turn it into a single ISO disc image file. Once converted, this file can be stored and organized on your hard drive, perhaps used at a later time to burn another disc.
Another cool thing you can do with ISO files is using them on your computer as virtual discs, mounted in a virtual CD/DVD drive. Because virtual drives exist only in your computer’s virtual memory, their performance is as much as 200 times faster than a real optical drive.
There are plenty of programs available for creating and burning ISO disc images, but my favorite is Alcohol 120% from Alcohol Soft. This software does it all — from image file creation and disc burning to virtual drive emulation.
For image making, the program supports three file types for CDs — .iso; .cue/.bin; and the CloneCD standard .ccd/.img/.sub file formats — but for DVDs, Alcohol 120% uses…