[adventured]

Prompted a thought: bits are always either there or not, ultimately, correct? (meaning you can either recover it, or never can) Whereas with printed or written text, you can recover partial data - a partial single letter for example - and conclude what it was. With the potential of written text also being generally far more restricted in possibilities (given you know, eg the language and time frame), than what's on a data disc.

[colechristensen]

But bits are abstractions encoded in the physical world which is not at all 'either there or not' anywhere near the scale of writable CDs. For starters for every 24 bits of data 56 bits are written on the physical media (8 to 14 encoding and a redundancy byte for every 3 data byes) and then the pits and lands are written into dye ... much like a written page if you language consisted of a very long straight series of lines of varying length.

[rmc]

If you stored your bits with lots of redundancy and checksums, then you could still recover the bits if some of the bits are 'gone'.