I'm sorry to hear about your problem. It can be really frustrating to loose your photos. I've used software to recover some of mine after a hard drive went bad. I didn't manage to get all of them, but I did recover most. The information is still on the card, but the file allocation table now tells the software that it's okay to reuse the space that they occupy. Even inserting the card into a drive could potentially write over some of the photos. Most PC repair services, like Geek Squad, have software to recover lost data.
I'm a professional photographer and have shot several weddings. I have gotten into the habit of making two backups of all my photos. I keep one set on the card and have multiple cards. I download them to my laptop to edit them, and then I make DVD copies of the original and the edited versions. It increases the workload, but I've had disks go bad and cameras stolen or destroyed by the TSA and it's been worth the time to make backups.