Installing recovery HD accidentally deleted all my files on External Hard Drive - How do I get back??

I am preparing my mac for selling, and I wanted to keep mountain lion on it, so I tried to install Recovery HD. however I accidentally clicked yes when it said it will delete from the external hard drive. So now all the files I had saved on there, including all my songs, are gone. I can't use time Machine because my time machine backups were on that hard drive. Someone please help me!!

If you erased that hard drive accidentally, there's not much you can do to easily recover. You can try some recovery utilities, like Data Rescue or File Salvage. The results are not likely to be pretty, as you will have lost the entire directory structure.
For the future, one set of backups is not enough, for precisely this kind of reason. Also, storing other data on the same drive as your backups is a similarly bad idea. Maintain a minimum of two separate backups, on two completely separate physical devices, and do not put any other data on any of those backup drives.

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