Possbility of recovering my photos? EXT3/4 + XMBC + Years

[FileRecPossibility]

I'll just explain what I have and if anyone could give me an approximate guess as to whether file recovery might be possible or not that would be super!

1. 500GB Drive (465GB actual)
2. Using Ubuntu 10.4 installer, split drive into 100GB for windows, 100mb for Grub, and the 365GB for Ubuntu
3. Installed and ran XBMC, always read media from network never local
4. Backed up approx 200GB from NTFS drive after my PC crashed put files into EXT3
5. Deleted those files after transfer back to a windows pc
6. Used only XMBC for 3.5 years, doesn't really write to the hdd that I know of
7. In this time maybe 20-40 fsck run, every 20 boots or so
8. Updated to Ubuntu 12.10 (2-3GB?)
9. Backed up ANOTHER 30GB to the linux portion (further overwritting the original 200GB maybe)
10. Quick Formatted HDD to NTFS, overwrote 150GB using windows7, shelved drive
11. Sold Drive

After selling drive I became worried that all my photos (girlfriend mostly, family photos, etc) may be recoverable. Of the 200GB I had on that drive, maybe 20GB is important to me. The EXT3/4 journal is completely gone, I know that. But I can't shake the feeling that recovery may be possible heuristically. I know they say to never use a drive after delete if you want recovery, to unmount immediately, and I definitely did not do that (3.5 years of normal media center use, which again no files media stored on local drive, but I did upgrade, backup, and blank 150gb off the front of that drive with windows) but I'm not aware of the linux filesystem enough to know how files marked as free are over-written "in order" or not.

Thoughts?