WD Elements External Hard Drive Deleted all my Data!!!

[Mystique]

Omfg! My portable hard drive failed on me and it deleted 8 years of pictures. I freaking lost 8 years of pictures. I'm so freaking depressed!

I recently bought a WD Elements 1 TB portable hard drive and l transferred all my pictures onto there because I was running out of hard drive space. I look through it occasionally and then today when I accessed the portable hard drive, I looked through the two main folders and all the pictures were gone! I was like in complete shock! I don't know how or why they got deleted, on the hard drive it says 31 GB is used and there's 900 GB free so I don't understand what's wrong with it. The only problem I think what could have messed it up was that I unplugged it from computer because I had to install a new DVD-Drive in my computer, but I don't see how that would affect it.

I looked up those data recovery programs online, but I'm not sure if they work or not. Do they? What should I do? Can you guys help me out? I'm so sad....