Comment by cosmic_cheese

I have a stack of old burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs with old files, some of which are family photos. Success with pulling files off of them has been mixed. Some of the discs have visible pinholes in the reflective layer and others visually look fine but have scratched up surfaces.

Tooling and documentation for recovering damaged discs is sparse, which doesn't help matters. I've been meaning to try going to a local retro game shop to get some of the discs resurfaced but I'm skeptical that it'll make much difference.

As far as I'm aware those discs contain (or did contain) the only copies of a bunch of those files. There might be some old hard drives or CF cards kicking around the family house but I doubt it and even if there are, they've either since been wiped or have succumb to bitrot.