At Seattle Data Recovery, located in the University of Washington Medicine Building in the Ballard neighborhood, we utilize advanced extraction methods to recover critical files from failing or severely scratched optical media. Compact Discs (CDs) generally fall into three main categories: pre-pressed read-only discs, write-once recordable media, and rewritable media. The vast majority of standard CDs hold up to 700 MB of data. We maintain the specialized hardware necessary to retrieve data across all standard and legacy CD formats.

Pre-Recorded and Application Format Recovery

Our technicians are equipped to extract and reconstruct data from all factory-pressed and standardized application formats:

• CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read-Only Memory): This format is standardized for computer data, software programs, and multimedia.

• CD-DA (Compact Disc Digital Audio): This is the standard format for commercial music CDs. It is designed to be played in standard home, car, and portable CD players.

• Video CD (VCD) & Super Video CD (SVCD): These are formats used to store video and audio. VCDs feature VHS-quality video, while SVCDs offer enhanced quality close to early DVDs.

• SACD (Super Audio CD): This is a high-resolution audio format offering significantly higher fidelity than standard CD-DA.

• Photo CD: This format was developed by Kodak to store and display high-quality photographic images on television screens or computers.

• CD-i (Compact Disc Interactive): This is an interactive multimedia format that combines text, graphics, sound, and animation, often requiring a dedicated CD-i player.

• CD+G (Compact Disc + Graphics): This is a specialized format mainly used for karaoke that embeds simple graphics and text alongside standard audio.

• CD-Text: This is a feature that allows text information to be stored alongside standard audio data.

Writable and Rewritable Media Recovery

We also recover custom-burned data, personal audio mixes, and archival backups from writable consumer media. These are the blank discs used in computers or CD recorders to burn audio, video, or data.

• CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable): This is write-once media. Data can be burned onto the disc, but it cannot be erased or overwritten. Once the disc is "closed," it behaves like a standard Read-Only CD.

• CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable): This is rewritable media. These discs utilize a phase-change material that allows you to write, erase, and rewrite data to the disc multiple times.

• CD-R Audio: This is a specialized sub-type of CD-R. Standalone consumer CD recorders require these specific discs to record music due to copyright royalty fees encoded into the media.

• High-Speed CD-RW: These were later iterations of the standard CD-RW designed to handle faster burning speeds.