All Digital Photos Gone

Hubby reset one of our computers this last week. He "cleared the drive" and installed a new OS. In the process he deleted nearly 10 years of digital photos. He had assumed they were on our other computer, but they were not. I asked several times this week if he could help me find the files, and he kept saying they were on the computers. Finally, he investigated, and they are gone.

I haven't printed pics since spring 2010 [printed up to fall 2009], and those were for the family album, not the individual kids' albums. That makes just over 3 years of family photos and 4.5 years of specific child photos completely gone. I am so sad and disappointed.

We used to have our pics on the now reset computer, the upstairs computer, and the external hard drive. He had pulled them from the upstairs computer to rely on the external drive months ago. For some reason, and he can't remember when or why, he took them off the external drive and 'thought they were saved somewhere else'. I didn't know they weren't on the external drive anymore, until I started looking. After he reset the computer I tried to access the photos, as he's always saved them in the past when updating or fixing a computer, but had no luck. I tried the upstairs computer, but didn't expect to find much as I knew from the last several months they weren't directly saved there. I had some trouble checking the external drive, and that's when I asked DH for help.

Hubby is trying a data recovery program at the moment, but he's not having any luck. I feel like crying, but I'm numbing out. This is so heartbreaking.