Precious photos gone?

Recently  my step-daughter went on a trip of a lifetime to Europe.  She took many  photos with her iPhone 4.  This afternoon she plugged her phone into  her laptop in order to update her OS, and now all her Europe pictures  are gone.  They seem to have been replaced with a set of photos from a  historical point in time.
I've quizzed her as to what  happened, but it looks like she inadvertantly clicked "Ok" to what must  have been a request to restore a backup to her phone.  I'm not sure why  iTunes would by default want to restore a backup, but that's the only  conclusion that I can come to.
So, the obvious question is, is there any way to get those photos back?
I understand that restoring a backup essentially "wipes" what is on the phone.  That said, what I'd like to know is just what mechanism is used to "wipe".  Could it be possible that the photos taken on the trip have just been deleted as in your standard filesystem form of delete (where the bits are still potentially there, but the pointer to them isn't)?
Can any iOS Ninjas out there shed some light on this situation?  Is it worth me getting my hacker hands dirty to get those files back or is this a well-and-truly hopeless situation?
Oh yes - I have looked on iCloud - sadly it looks like her phone wasn't set up to sync to iCloud, so that's a dead end.

The problem is that the photos were not simply deleted they may have been overwritten during the restore.
There are some third party PC and Mac apps which do iPhone data recovery, however, there is no guarantee that they will work in this case.

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