CD Labels: A Sticky Lesson

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and Christmas not far behind that I decided to pull out some of my old home movies to show the kids. I grew up in front of camera lenses, both video and still. Several years ago I borrowed all of my mom’s VHS home movies and digitized them. I took the files and copied them on to CDs and then, since they were very special, I printed out labels for them. Then I stuck the labels to the discs using a CD Stomper. If you don’t remember those, they looked like this:

For some reason I only made labels for about half of the discs. When I tried reading the discs this week, I found that all of the ones without labels were readable, and all of the ones with labels were not readable.

I read online that some newer/faster CD/DVD drives may have difficulty reading discs with labels stuck to them, so my first approach was to find an older CD-Rom drive and try that. Fortunately out in my garage I have a dozen or so to choose from. The oldest I could find was a 12x CD-Rom that I had once installed in a 486 DX4/100. It couldn’t read the disc. I also tried another CD/DVD drive, this one in an old P3/600 machine running Windows 98. It also couldn’t read the disc. The problem does not appear to be the drive’s speed.

I then read that it might be able to save the data by removing the label. Figuring that things couldn’t get worse, I gave that a shot next. Here’s what the disc looked like after picking at it with my fingernail for a few minutes:

Obviously, that didn’t work. I decided to take a plate, fill it with hot water, and add a few drops of dishwashing soap. From previous experience I know that soap and water will not hurt CDs. With the soap and water in place, I placed the CD upside down on to the plate.

After soaking for 30 minutes, this is what the water looked like:

As you can see, the ink from the label was clouding up everything. By this point the label was nice and soft and by rubbing it with a finger I was able to pretty much wipe it off.

This was the end of round one; by this time the label had dried and I couldn’t get any more off of the CD, so I repeated the process and let the CD soak a second time. After a second soaking, the rest of the label peeled off easily.

With the label completely removed it became apparent that this disc was ruined. Upon close inspection it appears the glue on the back of the label had begun to eat through the top layer of the disc. With the reflective layer eaten away, the disc is unreadable.

I’m off work next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I’m going to see if I can borrow those home movies one more time and try a different way of archiving them. Whatever method I choose, it will not involve putting stickers on the discs.