I got home from work last night and my wife told me about the photos she had taken that day of our son taking his first steps. When I went to look on the camera the message came up "No Picture". All of the photos had been wiped from the XD card.

Not only had we lost that days photos but also his first birthday and a weekend holiday we'd all had with family. My wife was distraught.

I don't have an XD card reader so I quickly drove down to ASDA to put it into one of their machines to see if they could see the photos (maybe it was the camera that was faulty). They couldn't see the photos either.

Next it was onto the internet to see if it was possible to recover them. Apparently so as the photos are not physically deleted from the card but overwritten with new data when more are taken. Phew.

Now all I had to do was track down the necessary software, preferably free, to recover the photos. After several downloads of software that claimed to be free but wasn't, or that just didn't work, I finally found the answer to my prayers.

A completely free program to recover photos from my XD card. The website guided me through it all step-by-step and it worked perfectly. It took around 45 minutes to recover 417 photos on the card, including all of the missing ones.

I've put the link on my free stuff page as I was so impressed. Thank you so much the people at ZAR, whoever you are, for this excellent program. You've made my wife very happy!!