It's not a total loss. I still have my 'Gif', 'Txt', 'Vid', and 'Zips' folders. But damn! those were tons of my favorite pix that I've collected for years!

They were on an external drive and 'Recycle bin' was no help.

Any recovery suggestions you all might have?  Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

Easus Data Recovery Gets my Vote - Scan the drive on where the files where - it can recover upto 2gigs worth for free but if you want to unlock the full program you have to pay.

https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizar...ftware.htm

Thanks, man! I DL'ed it but haven't installed it yet. I think I have more than two gigs. How much is it? $70? Probably worth it.

When you delete something from a hard drive, you are actually just telling the operating system that it's okay to overwrite whatever was written to that sector. Assuming nothing has been overwritten yet, data recovery software should be able to get it. I would suggest you avoid saving anything with that drive until then.

Recovery!! Hooray!!!

Thank you for the suggestion, Mr. D. I DL'ed the product and it helped indirectly. It did not show me deleted files, but it did show me a folder layout that made no sense so I went back to investigate.

I turned out that I had simply (and MASSIVELY) fat-fingered a drag/drop operation and sent both 'Pix' and 'Txt' files off to strange locations. Everything is back in place now. (Whew!)

The lesson, of course, is back-ups, back-ups, and more back-ups. Not having a ready back-up didn't matter this time, but it would have saved a heart attack.

Thank you all.