I've done data recovery for years, mostly to help out friends when their PowerBook hard drives die and they don't have a good backup. This weekend I got a frantic call from a friend whose digital camera's memory card had given up the ghost.

They'd just had their first child on December 26 and a memory card containing pictures of the baby in his first moments on earth was giving a "card not found" error after being inserted in a couple of different PC card readers. Imagine the horror.

After several disclaimers about not being able to guarantee results I took home the memory card to have a look-see. What made this case more interesting was the media format: XD. Not have the Olympus camera and cable handy made this a challenge until I remembered having an EDGE Dock & Multi Flash Card Reader for iPod in my office. I grabbed it hoping that it had the necessary XD card slot and it did!

For this project I wanted to use a new application to attempt the data recovery, Prosoft Engineering's Data Rescue II (US$99). I have previously been impressed by ProSoft's Drive Genius so why not?

Data Rescue II is an easy-to-use application for Mac OS X that can recover files and folders from crashed or corrupt hard drives, floppy drives, removable cartridges and media of all formats. Recovered data is saved to another volume, leaving the original drive untouched. Data Rescue can not only find your data in situations where the other tools fail, but it can usually restore icons, dates and even folder hierarchy.

A Quick Scan of the XD memory card yielded nothing, but a Thorough Scan hit paydirt. I recovered 112 photos and saved the day. Data Rescue II is the first PowerPage PowerPick of 2006.