How you recover your lost data

After going through the process of reinstalling the operating system, I mounted the backup hard drive and discovered that it was empty. I had some how mixed up the hard drive I used to back up all the data with a hard drive that I wanted to wipe. Because I had done such a poor job of retaining backups on external media, I did not have any backups of my pictures and videos.

This is a lot of work, and it would help if you are an experienced Linux user. Though, the process laid out is completely free, which beats any $500 software out there.