This may be a dumb question, but did the person who deleted the backups also delete /home? Because there I had a backups for January 23 and 24. Just stupid old me didn't download them to my PC

I do however have a January 19 backup. Anyhow Jeremy, if the /home directory is still there, then hopefully my backups will be (REAL wishful thinking here). Regardless, I would imagine you backed everything up BEFORE you reinstalled the OS, however little that was.
BTW: This has to be against the law what was done. I'm just curious: who do you file a greivance with? Like a police report, but for the Internet. Who takes care of that?