Is it possible to recover a deleted FileVault sparse bundle in OS X?

Question

I made a huge noob mistake with my Macbook. I used Disk Inventory X to see why my drive was so full and it showed all my files under my user account as well as a huge amount of data in /Users/.myuseraccount called the sparsebundle. I had FileVault on but not Time Machine. I thought I might have used Time Machine to create an image of when I first got the computer, but I'm not sure if I did or not. It looked to me as if the data was completely separate files, but when I deleted the sparsebundle files, I could no longer log back into my account and now it shows my /Users/myuseraccount directory to be empty.

PLEASE somebody tell me I didn't just lose everything. Only a small amount of these files were backed up elsewhere. I cannot afford to lose all this. Is there disk recovery software that can restore this? Or could I possible take it back to the Apple store?

Answer 1

After speaking with tech support, I have determined that there is no way to recover these files. With the encryption of FileVault, there would be no way to tell what the files were.

Answer 2

Those files in the .sparsebundle folder were indeed your account. First: don't do anything on the computer until you've done what you can to recover the files -- everything that gets written to that disk has a chance of overwriting some of your data, so the fewer changes the better. See my answer to this question for more details.

I'm not up-to-date on the best software for recovering deleted files on Macs; anyone?