Help me help me - Oh my god, have I just lost 7 years of photos? →[More:]Wow, really hoping someone can help me. I had all our photos (stored in our "shared photos" folder in XP) backed up on an external drive, so I thought. So I would periodically remove them from our hard drive to save space.

Well, last time I did a copy over to the external drive, something happened. It replaced the entire "shared photos" folder with the present write on my hard drive, and in so doing effectively wiped out all the additional folders. Honeymoon photos, our cat that died 4 years ago, tons and tons of photos, all removed. Is there any way I can get them back?

Something that may help - I had tried to back up the whole C drive a few times on to the same external drive, but it was always incomplete because the external drive I was using is FAT32 and so it would only back up to a certain point - so many megs, I don't remember. Because they were always incomplete, I deleted those backup files, but they may still be there? And if so, MAY have some of the old photos?

I know I should back up. I bought a new 120G NTFS drive yesterday, and was going to move everything onto it today when I discovered this terrible error.

Can I do ANYTHING?? Of course, preferably free or cheap? I am terrified to even walk outside and tell the mrs. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.