If you don't backup you take that risk.

YDI for so many reasons. If your photos were so previous, you would have sacrificed the $100 for an external hard drive. I guess you had to learn the hard way.

If He reinstalled windows then u can look for a file called windows.old and your pictures should still be in your folder

You may be able to recover them, but any free file recovery software probably won't recover them all. If they're really important and you don't have a backup, SHUT OFF THE COMPUTER NOW and find a professional file recovery service. The longer you use your computer, the harder it is to recover the pictures. As everyone else said, you really should have had a backup, so maybe you can learn from this experience to get an external hard drive and start doing regular backups of anything you can't afford to lose.

It's not backed up unless there are three copies, on two separate storage forms, one of which is at a remote site somewhere. YDI.

RULE #1 - ALWAYS back up your files!

As pretty much everyone else said, backups are a very good idea. However, backing up stuff can be a pain. So, what I would recommend, is just purchasing an external hard drive and keeping all the pics on that. The external will be a fairly safe place, since it is isolated from the rest of the computer, so if the computer goes bad the external is still good and you can just hook it up to another computer if you need to. I would still do backups just to be safe (maybe once a month or so), but putting the stuff on an external drive will make them much safer than keeping them on the internal drive.

In the words of Pam, holy shit snacks. I'm an author and if someone messed up my hard drive, I would cry, scream, throw things, throw them, etc. On the other hand... I also back up my files weekly. Or whenever I'm done with a huge project. ... you do back up your files right?

You may still be able to recover them. When something is erased from a hard drive, it always leaves, a footprint behind, do the files may still exist in some form. Just get a professional to check it for you, see if it's possible.

Doesn't really matter there is a program that can pull up all felted files my friend has it. Nothing is ever deleted completely he has got files back on mine when the same thing happened to me it's data recovery.