Digging around on an ancient home-burnt DVD I discovered a couple of large video clips that simply weren't readable -- in any of my three machines -- and of course they were the very clips I wanted. I covered recovering audio CD data a while back, but what about DVDs?

A quick search turned up Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier, a free program that claims to recover files from disks suffering physical damage.

The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end.

Test #1 was on a file from which I could only copy or play the first half. That went brilliantly. In fact it took Unstoppable Copier only a few minutes to recover the whole thing. Woot!

Test #2 was more taxing. The file showed on the directory but there was no way to so much as get a look-see at it. This took all night but by morning it had been recovered. There are one or two glitches in the video where data is apparently gone for good, but they're easily editable and it's relief to something back!

And the other good thing about Unstoppable Copier is that it's available for Linux, Linux 64-bit and all flavours of Windows.