The catch is I can't find any working software that actually does anything of note to be this potential in depth process. I wrote a script that runs rsync to copy the files to a more suitable location and I can see when there's an error so I can I presumably run some more in depth process on the CDs that are damaged. To make things extra exciting, many of the CDs seem to only be properly readable on Macs (you can see the files on a PC, but you can't actually copy them) I'm good with a process for the good CDs. A s a surprise to no one, it turns out that about 20% of the CDs seem to have a problem with some unreadable data and about 5% can't be read at all! well, I'd say better protected, but just being written to CD-Rs isn't good enough to be called protected in the first place. I recently discovered binders of very old CDs which have some data on it which likely isn't elsewhere and I have started a project to copy the contents to our server where it can be.
