How do I get files off old CDs, DVDs, floppy disks and tapes?
Get the data onto a drive first and worry about opening it second. What hardware you need, in what order to work, and which formats are genuinely lost causes.
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Time
- 1 hr 30 min
- Read
- 4 min
- Safety
- caution
Short answer
Work in one direction: copy everything from the old medium onto a modern drive as raw files, before trying to open anything. A USB optical drive handles CDs and DVDs cheaply. Floppies need a USB floppy drive and often will not read at all. Zip disks, tapes and proprietary backup formats usually mean a specialist or a service. Once copied, deal with unopenable file formats separately — that is a software problem and much easier than the hardware one.
Two different problems get confused here. Reading the physical medium is a hardware race against decay. Opening a twenty-year-old file format is a software puzzle with no deadline. Doing them in that order saves a great deal of frustration.
Safety
Step by step
- Sort by urgency, not by interest.Writable CDs and DVDs from the 1990s and 2000s used dyes that fade, and are the most likely to be unreadable already. Pressed commercial discs last far longer. Floppies are fragile and magnetic. Do the writable optical discs and floppies first.
- Get the right reader.An external USB optical drive is cheap and reads CDs and DVDs. A USB floppy drive reads standard 3.5-inch disks, though not all older formats. Larger and stranger media — Zip, Jaz, tape cartridges, 5.25-inch floppies — need either second-hand hardware or a transfer service.
- Copy everything before opening anything.Drag the entire contents of each disc to a folder on a drive, named for what was written on the disc. Do not stop to look at things. Getting the bits off is the time-critical part.
- Make disc images for anything awkward.If a disc is audio, video, or a program, copy it as a single image file rather than as files. That preserves the structure and lets you work on the copy repeatedly without touching the original again.
- Retry failures differently, not harder.A disc that fails in one drive frequently reads in another, because drives differ in how well they cope with marginal media. Try two or three drives before giving up. Clean gently with a soft cloth, wiping from the centre straight outwards.
- Use software that keeps going past errors.Ordinary copying stops at the first bad sector. Tools designed for damaged media skip errors, record where they were, and retry them afterwards, so you get everything readable rather than everything up to the first fault.
- Then tackle the file formats.Old word processor and database files can usually be opened by a current office suite, a free converter, or an online conversion service. Where nothing opens it, an emulator running the original software is a genuine option, and there are enthusiast communities for most obsolete formats.
- Consolidate and back up properly.You now have on one drive what was spread over a hundred discs. That is one copy of something you have just spent a weekend on. Make the second copy immediately, and put one somewhere else.
If it doesn't work
Disc is not recognised at all
Cause: Dye degradation, a delaminated reflective layer, or a format the drive cannot read — Fix: Try other drives, including an older one if you can borrow it. Hold the disc to the light — visible pinholes or a bronze cast in the reflective layer means physical loss and no software will help.
Copying stops partway with a read error
Cause: A damaged region of the disc — Fix: Use error-tolerant copying software so the rest is retrieved, and retry the failed region afterwards, sometimes in a different drive.
Floppy reads as unformatted
Cause: Magnetic decay, a different original format, or a dirty head — Fix: Try another disk to check the drive works, then another drive. Disks written on non-PC systems need specialist hardware and are usually a service job.
Files copy but nothing will open them
Cause: Obsolete application format — Fix: Identify the format from the extension and the file's first bytes, then look for a converter. This is a solvable problem and it is not urgent once the file is safely copied.
Home-recorded video DVDs will not copy
Cause: Unfinalised discs, or a disc structure the drive cannot navigate — Fix: Try a drive from a different manufacturer, and software intended for video discs that can rip past structural faults.
Questions people ask
Is it worth paying a transfer service?
For tapes, unusual disk formats and video cassettes, often yes — the hardware is scarce and the expertise is real. For CDs, DVDs and standard floppies, a cheap USB drive and an evening does the job.
How long do I have?
Nobody can tell you for an individual disc, and the honest answer is that failures are happening now across media written twenty and thirty years ago. Treat it as this year's job rather than next year's.
What about the photographs on old phones and cameras?
Same principle. Card readers still exist for most historic card formats, cheaply, and the cards themselves are usually still readable. It is the devices that die.