Im in Chile at present, and unfortunatly, my wife saved all our travel photos to a computer at the hostel we are staying at. These included our trip to Machu Picchu and The Iguacu falls, both amazing experiences we wont be repeating anytime soon. The computer, needless to say, had Ccleaner, so once she turned it off all our photos were deleted. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
It's extremely unlikely CCleaner would have deleted your photos but aside from that, you could try Recuva to see if you can get back the pics if they were deleted (and asap before they are overwritten):
The pc belongs to the hostel? You downloaded pics from your camera to the pc and then deleted the pics from the camera? How were you expecting to get the pics home?
As JDP says, if the pics were downloaded to a folder which was not a Windows temporary folder or Temp Internet files etc then CC would not under normal settings delete them. (Actually I added quite a bit to what JDP said.) Are you sure they have gone - do a search on date or filename etc. Are you sure that the download worked - did you see the pics on the pc after you'd downloaded them?
On further reading the pc could be yours, if so ignore much of the first para. Mind you a flash drive or a few CDR's would help.
If you can't find the pics you could run recuva on the camera memory card, or at least have a go. If you find them there then save them to a properly named folder on the pc, check that they're there, copy/back them up to some other media.
If you're going to be traveling it would be best to pop any pictures onto a USB Thumb Drive then have the wife pop that into her purse for safe keeping. Then make certain to upload them to a free hosting site after registering to get your files back such as MediaFire, RapidShare, etc., that way you have a relatively reliable backup online too.
well i think that your best bet would be to run recuva on both your computer and your camra's memory. as those above me have said it is extremely unlike that ccleaner wiped your travel pictures.
what i think is more likely is that the hostel had the computer set up so that it would clear all user data when it was shut down. i mean if i was a hostel owner i wouldn't a bunch a people's random stuff on my computer. besides it is a security risk...but it doesn't really matter what caused it my advice to you is the same.
however "if" ccleaner did delete your files then hopefully it only deleted them because if ccleaner wiped (deleted and wrote over) those files then it would be a lot harder if not impossible to recover them off of your computer. the good news it that when you delete pictures off of a camera's memory card those files a usually just deleted. so don't take any more pictures with that camera until after you run recuva or another file recovery program because if you do you will be writing over those deleted files making it hard if not impossible to recover them.
in the future buy some usb memory sticks, more memory cards for your camra or dvds and save your pictures on that at least until you can put them on your home computer and personally i would keep them even after that because you never know...if something happens to you computer it is always good to have a backup.