<t>When I was 11 years old or so, I made copies of my Web 0.9 websites onto CDs among other original content.<br/>
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Now I'm 25 years old, I had forgotten about the CDs and the content still has sentimental value. I would like to get rid of that stack of (decaying) physical CDs while creating backups of the content on other physical forms (local hard drive, USB sticks, remote server...).<br/>
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To copy from the CD into the hard drive, I'm using simple copy and paste because initially I didn't want to bother dealing with ISO images, I am interested in backups of the content and the files timestamps, not having a 1:1 binary copy of CDs or a huge ISO file since most of the files are redundant or contain useless large files.<br/>
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I messed up and I totally forgot I used to make multisession CDs, which is the act of burning onto the same CD multiple times. Here's why I'm asking the question:<br/>
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One time I was messing around with a CD and tried out the "Create ISO" option on Windows 7 for the sake of curiosity. Turns out:<br/>
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- The ISO contained a backup of an AOL installation with all of its files corrupt, and nothing else.<br/>
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- When browsing the CD with Windows Explorer, the AOL files were nowhere to be found. There were only personal files, not corrupt.<br/>
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This baffled me how there was potentially invisible files to the file browser.<br/>
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There is a likelihood the OS on which the images were burned on were either Windows 98 or Windows XP. I do not remember.<br/>
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Based on the above description of the situation and the fact that information about the how the CDs were burned were forgotten over time:<br/>
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- Did I interpret something wrong? (i.e. the invisible files may be in fact erased content?)<br/>
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- Is there a reason this is happening on Windows 7 (bad driver, missing CD metadata)? Is there a feature on Windows 7 that would allow me to browse the "invisible" content natively in the file browser?<br/>
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- Can I retrieve all the contents of the CD without having to create a CD image, preferably in a native way?<br/>
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- I assume the "recommended" way to backup the files would be to create a CD image using whatever software, then extracting the files out of the CD image. Please correct me if I am wrong, and add recommendations if there are precautions to take in the process of doing it for multisession CDs.<br/>
I am not looking for software recommendations, unless my use case is so particular I would need to be pointed towards specific software.<br/>
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(Following this I noticed how certain CDs/DVDs I have showed up as blank to Windows which asked me if I wanted to write on it, whereas the surface of the disc indicated it was written on. I still wonder if there are invisible files on these discs, or if the disc has rotted, or if it's just a failed burn I forgot to throw away)<br/>
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The question is not about how to create a CD image. It is about the proper handling of multisession CDs content retrieval in a non professional environment.</t>
