It's not erased. Don't do anything and take it into a computer shop they should know how to recover it for you if restoring the trash can doesn't work

I'm sorry that happened. But ALWAYS back it up if it's important. Get a usb drive, use online backup, there's so many options, find one or a couple and use them. I have stuff that's backed up on a usb drive, on a spare laptop, and online because it's just really important to me. But I have had devastating losses of stuff before so unfortunately I too learned the hard way, so I get it sucks and I am really sorry but use it as a lesson. And hopefully as others have suggested you can have the data recovered.

from 'i do' till after baby was born and no one bothered to back up or print. Who said it was his job this WHOLE time to keep pics safe. sounds like both to blame he was just the unfortunate one.

Next time you will make a backup on a CD or usb stick.

One word....backup, sorry two words....backup backup. Sorry for your loss.

Why wouldn't you have them in actual picture form?

As long as you don't put anything else on that hard drive you can take it somewhere (or do it yourself if you know how) to recover them. Stuff like that is never truly gone from a hard drive, unless he deleted them, covered em up, deleted again and covered that stuff up.

Use a recovery tool to find them and restore the files

If the pictures were simply deleted, the data is still there. When you delete a file normally, only the reference to the file is gone. The picture itself remains, until it's overwritten by new data. I would highly recommed using the free programs Recuva or PhotoRec as soon as possible to recover your images. Good luck.

Download and run a program called "recuva" enable deep scan mode and it just might be able to recover the lost pics.