How do I recover disappeared photos and backup from iPhone?

After the recent back up, the last 10 years of my 3 kids lives are just gone. I'm devastated! I have plenty of storage, all backup options are turned on. They are not in hidden or recently deleted on any device. I went to backups and it looks like I just opened the account. My phone only shows one recent backup from an hour ago and icloud only includes 4 calendar updates all from this month. What is that??? I have searched and searched for solutions and come up with nothing. I started a chat with apple support and they only asked me to look in all of the places I have already looked. How is this possible??

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: All photos and backup gone!