Preserving optical media from the command-line
The KB has quite a large collection of offline optical media, such as CD-ROMs, DVDs and audio CDs. We’re currently investigating how to stabilise the contents of these materials using disk imaging. During the initial phase of this work I did a number of tests with various open-source tools. It’s doubtful whether we’ll end up using these same tools in our actual workflows. The main reason for this is the sheer size of the collection, which we estimated at some 15,000 physical carriers; possibly even more. At those volumes we will need a solution that involves the use of a disk robot, and these often require dedicated software (we still need to investigate this more in-depth).
Nevertheless, throughout the initial testing phase I was surprised at the number of useful tools that are available in the open source domain. Since this will probably be of interest to others as well, I decided to polish a selection from my rough working notes into a somewhat more digestible form (or so I hope!). I edited my original notes down to the following topics:
- How to figure out the device path of the CD drive
- How to create an ISO image from a CD-ROM or DVD
- How to check the integrity of the created ISO image
- How to extract audio from an audio CD
In addition there’s a final section that covers my attempts at imaging a multisession / mixed mode CD. The result of this particular exercise wasn’t all that successful, but I included it anyway, as some may find it useful. All software mentioned here are open-source tools that are available for any modern Linux distribution (I’m using Linux Mint myself). Some can be used under Windows as well using Cygwin.
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optical-media
- Identification of physical storage media and devices with Python and the Windows API
- Introducing Isolyzer 1.4
- Offline digital data carriers in the KB deposit collection
- A simple workflow tool for imaging optical media using readom and ddrescue
- Resurrecting the first Dutch web index: NL-menu revisited
- Update on Isolyzer: UDF, HFS+ and more!
- Image and Rip Optical Media Like A Boss!
- Imaging CD-Extra / Blue Book discs
- Detecting broken ISO images: introducing Isolyzer
- Breaking WAVEs (and some FLACs too)
- Preserving optical media from the command-line
