Photo cameras have been around for over one and a half century now and really revolutionized the way we capture images of the world.

While in days gone by a painter would take weeks and months to painstakingly and meticulously paint a portrait or landscape to make it as realistic as possible, with the coming of the cameras, extremely realistic images of real-world objects could be created simply at the touch of a button. The cameras became widely popular within a few decades of their invention and they are still the rage.

Until the last decade or so, the principles on which a camera worked remained the same. A thin roll of plastic film coated with a light-sensitive substance such as silver halide was loaded inside the camera behind the shutter. The latter opened for a split second and the light entered through the lens, exposing the film. The silver halide underwent a chemical reaction in the presence of light and an image was formed of whatever scene existed in front of the camera.

The film cameras have ruled the roost for the last 150 years, with Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras being the culmination of the technology. For all their popularity, these cameras have some drawbacks. They are heavy and bulky. They use rolls of films in which the tape has to be moved by an electric motor. It, along with the batteries, adds to the overall weight. Commonly available film rolls have a capacity of only 37 frames. If a photographer is in a mood to take hundreds of pictures, he or she has to carry around dozens of rolls. This is very inconvenient. Film photography is a very expensive hobby because of the cost involved in buying the rolls and batteries as well as getting the exposed film developed in a dark room. Just when people thought they had to learn to live with these problems, digital cameras arrived on the scene.

These do not use a film at all. Instead, they use a light-sensitive semiconductor to record the image by breaking it into tiny pixels. These images keep getting stored on a removable flash memory card that is inserted into the camera. Since they do not use a film or motor, the digital cameras are very small in size and can easily fit inside your shirt pocket. They are also very lightweight and quite economical to run, since there is no expenditure on purchasing or developing of film rolls. You simply take the memory card to a photography shop and take a print-out of the pictures that you like. Recently, many reasonably priced photo-quality printers have arrived in the market, enabling users to print pictures from the comfort of their home.

Digital cameras drastically reduce the cost of taking photographs, but they have one major drawback – data loss. There are many hardware and software causes due to which the memory card of these cameras may lose the pictures abruptly without any warning. Users often drop the camera into water or fire, or it gets crushed under some heavy object. The memory card also gets corrupted in many instances, leading to data loss because it cannot be read by the camera. Then there are software reasons, such as when the user accidentally reformats the memory card or deletes a picture.

When a camera loses all its data, it is a very disappointing event for the user because the photos have been taken after much effort and care. There may be pictures of rare events such as marriage or birthdays, family get-togethers, world tour and so on. The pictures once lost cannot be clicked all over again because that time would never return. The only option users have is to recover the images one at a time. There are two ways of going about this.

You can download a Do It Yourself (DIY) data recovery software from the many available on the Internet, and then follow the simple instructions to go on to recover your pictures. DIY recovery is very fast and effective in cases of data loss due to simple software errors such as accidental deletion or even reformatting of the storage media. However, if the data loss is due to hardware errors, then DIY recovery is not of much use. In this case, you have to get the pictures professionally recovered by a recovery company.

Professional recovery is a very expensive proposition. Even DIY recovery is a hassle for ordinary users who may not understand the technical complexities involved. Truly, in cases of data loss, prevention is better than cure. A simple way by which you can avoid data loss is by regularly downloading pictures from your digital camera onto a laptop or a compact disk. Most cameras come with a software that makes the entire process of taking backups a breeze. Whenever you lose data from your memory card, you can simply restore your pictures from the backup without any delay or cost. Nothing can be simpler and cheaper!