Missing photo albums
Unless you actually backed up your photos, they are, unfortunately gone.


  This ensures I have two back up devices.


This is an incorrect assumption.  What you did was ensure that you had two devices that were selectively synchronized.

There's a major difference between synchronization and backing up.  Synchronization keeps changes consistent across all devices.  This includes deletions.  Backing up makes a copy of the file(s) for safe keeping.

If you delete a photo, file, album, and it's synced with multiple devices, that deletion will propagate across all your devices.  If you had those same files backed up to a USB drive or another service (like DropBox or OneDrive) anything you accidentally deleted would be available for recovery.

As for your albums - they are "containers" that allow you to organize your folders.  If you deleted these containers, the change synched across all your devices.  As inconvenient as this is, consider yourself fortunate that you didn't lose your photos and think of this as a wake up call to implement a proper backup procedure before you inadvertently lose all your photos.