Back home, James was a happy and proud man and received accolades for having completed the assignment. It was then that James? manager came up with another special assignment for him. James? manager had wanted him to make a collection of the finest photographs from the World Cup matches for a special cover story.

James usually had a habit. He always burned his digital photos onto a compact disc at the end of every assignment. As always, James had prepared a disc containing all the photographs that he had shot at the matches.

It was then that disaster struck without a warning. As part of the new assignment, when James tried to access the files on his compact disc, he found to his dismay that he was not able to access them.

He was to start on his new assignment next week and there he sat perplexed without a clue as to what was to happen next. If he could not retrieve these photographs, his company might lose a million pounds and his own reputation might face a hit. It was a close ?do-or-die? situation for him.

It was then that he had his friend John to his rescue. John had faced a similar situation two years back when he was faced with a faulty memory stick that contained all his memorable family photographs. John had handed over his hard drive over to one of the prime photo recovery services and had all his valuable photos restored.

Going by John's advice, James approached a professional photo recovery service. To his profound relief, James was able to recover all his precious works and, of course, save his reputation, which indeed was at stake.

Digital photo recovery or image recovery is the process of restoring or salvaging photographs from media which otherwise are believed to have been damaged or functioning incorrectly. The media can be of any type but is not limited to xD-Picture card, secure digital card, multimedia card and memory stick.

For recovering data from the media, you can adopt two approaches: either you use software applications that help you do this or employ data recovery company services.

You can lose photographs that you have stored in any media owing to a variety of reasons. Some of the common problems encountered by photo recovery services with certain media are as follows:

?Deleted or lost images

?Damaged or corrupt file structure

?Accidental formatting of data

?Cards that are unreadable for some reason

?Electrically damaged media

?Corrupt images stored in media

Apart from this, photo recovery services can restore photographs from other types of media such as CD, Hard disk and DVD.

The damages that occur to the media that subsequently result in data loss can be broadly classified into two types:

?Physical Damage: In this type of damage, the media itself could have been subject to physical distortion. The most common types of these include the induction of scratches on the surface of a compact disk, head crash in the case of a hard drive or misalignment of the physical parts of the media. These kinds of damages cannot be repaired by the user and requires the intervention of a professional.

?Logical Damage: These types of damages are more common due to power outages and high moisture levels. When a power failure occurs, any new data is not written back to the medium and subsequently this leads to an inconsistent file or folder structure in the media. As a result, accessing the files or folders becomes impossible thus leading to data loss.

Though the digital image recovery process is foolproof and is capable of restoring the images in 95 ? 100 % of the cases, it is always a safe idea that we take a backup on more than one medium. After all, it would be additional effort at your end to treasure life's most memorable moments.