I have a big problem.  My brother accidentally deleted some VERY important pictures off of his computer, and there is no trace of them.  Trash is EMPTY, and I can't find any backups.  Does anybody know of a way of searching deep within the computer for these pictures, or is that even possible?  Any help WOULD be greatly APPRECIATED.  Thanks in advance.What OS is this?

It is strongly advised that you don't write anything else to that disk for the time being.  Give Recuva a try and see if that helps.  You may also want to try PC Inspector.

If you have Windows XP, System Restore might have backups of the files, but I would try the recovery programs first.System restore does not change the documents and data of the user so I don't think that is a solution. But I will be wrong as I know you're much smarter than me Chris.

Jonas Well, System Restore sometimes keeps copies of files that have been deleted.  There have been plenty of TIMES when I restored to an old point and had long-gone files reappear.  It's a bit of a longshot, though.