Ydi for not backing up your pictures in more than one places and letting someone who clearly knows nothing about computers attempt to "fix" your stuff.

If your husband doesn't know what 'formatting' means, why was he the one attempting to fix it? Also, as you had important files on there, it might have been worth calling someone who was paid and qualified to do it. And this is what backing up is for.

There's no happily ever after there. 

I know this is a place for griping rather then seeking advice, but don't lose hope, there are dozens of free programs that can recover photos off of a hard drive if all that happened was just him formatting it. Recuva, and zar off the top of my head, as well as several live linux distrobutions (basically linux that runs off of a CD rather then having to install it). The important thing is DO NOT, save anything to the hard drive, until you have recovered what you need.

ydi, as a professional photographer you have one main batch of photos, and ATLEAST 2 back ups from the original main batch, making it a total of 3 or more copies of each photo. you are a bad photographer!

lol fyl

YDI for not backing it up. Recover it noob D:<

always always make 2 copies minimum of your pics. especially in the raw. take puter in to a techy. and get a separate puter for your work. ydi. and fyl. my hubby the same but that's why he has his own laptop and knows not to tinker with mine.

If it was so borked it had to be formatted there was probably not much you could do. You should had used backups and you shouldn't have stored on an external harddrive because they are a lot more likely to break. Harddrive crashes are common and even the best harddrive is going to break sooner or later, you were really at fault for this one. Your best bet now is to take it apart, take out the harddrive from the external case, put it inside a computer and try to use a recovery program. But you're probably ******.

I would have killed him if he was my husband