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CD XRescue
We've
all come across the odd CD that
refuses all attempts to copy data to
your hard disk. You put it there
yourself not
long ago and it was verified
against the original files but for
some reason - it just won't have it.
Enter CD X Rescue from 321 Studios.
In
case you are not familiar with the
company - 321 make the now famous
DVD X Copy which is now receiving
much hassle from the film industry
because of it's ability to clone
DVDs. Whilst we are all for the use
of such software for the legit
backup of one's own DVDs, we can
well understand why the film
industry are somewhat upset about
this. But we are here to discuss X
Rescue which should cause nobody any
harm and do the world of good to
people who went out and purchased
hundreds of unbranded blank CDs only
to find that the data integrity was
to suffer shortly afterwards.
We
plead guilty to the above scenario -
blanks were once pretty expensive so
it looked an attractive option to buy blanks
in cheap tubs at what looked like a
good price at the time until you
want to load up these discs and find that you are
getting cyclic redundancy errors and
the like. Scratches also seem to
grow like fungi on CDs!
CD
X Rescue is available from the 321
website as either a CD purchase or
download. We opted for the download
as we were in a hurry to see exactly
how good this software was and
whether it would live up to it's
claim of rescuing the virtually
unrecoverable and once installed - the software must
be activated before you can use it
but after activation - X Rescue
loads with no nags or further
warnings.
For
starters, we threw our very
worst disc at X Rescue hoping for a
small miracle and lo and behold - it
didn't work! Not because the
software is cack - but because this
disc was well beyond rescue so
having delegated it to coaster land
- we loaded our next bad CD. This
disc was readable without X rescue
but copying files was a nightmare at
best with almost none of the files
coming across.
We
launched X Rescue, read the TOC of
the disc and were presented with an
explorer type interface with
directories on the left and the
contents on the right so away we
went selecting both full directories
and single files and off they came!
The files were indeed rescued and
copied to our hard disk without so
much as a sneeze.
Now
we're getting really excited so we
went on to the next of our bad CDs - all of
which were angrily marked with a big
fat X just to remind ourselves of how
upset we were at not being able to
read them again. This time - all
files were seen by Rescue but we came up
against files that looked like they
had some really bad read errors. At
this point - you are prompted to
either skip this file - skip all
such files - accept this file or all
subsequent files then let the thing
just carry on.
Well - it is now 1pm and we started
this at 10pm last night and it has
just 8 more minutes to go because we
accepted all erroneous files - X
Rescue has recovered ALL but one of
the 141 corrupt files! OK - this is
a long time and I am sure the CD ROM
drive takes a little thrashing but
at least it can be done while you
sleep freeing up your computer for
the day.
Finally -
I am really glad that I didn't
throw these CDs against the wall
in fury (as I have been known to do) as X Rescue can't
handle CDs which have been shattered
in this manner :-|
X
Rescue his is now one of the most
important utilities in our tool kit
and it could be yours too if - like
us, you have a sizeable
collection of CDs containing JPGs,
MP3s, WAVs, Text, Word documents or
anything that is really important to
you.
For $29.00 USD - you would be
stark raving loony not to buy this
product. It has already paid for
itself a few times over in less than just one day.
Details from 321 studios at
www.dvdxcopy.com
J.R.O. |