Restore corrupted data?

[Phaelax]

I had a massive folder of about 500GB of data that I was organizing and copying over to my NAS for backup. Upon deleting a subfolder, somehow the entire root directory was deleted. Obviously at that size it was not in the recycle bin (I'm using Win7).

I used a program called "MiniTool Power Data Recovery" and it appeared to have recovered everything I lost in about 4 hours. I copied several more GBs over to my NAS before problems started. The files I just copied over ran perfectly fine on the NAS, however, the original source (the recovered ones) no longer worked and the data for the entire recovered directory is now corrupted. I looked through a few of the files with a hex editor and indeed the header information for those formats was not what it should of been.

Everything else on the drive appears to be unaffected, only the files which needed recovered are corrupted.

I've tried other tools to see if I could undelete the files again and store them to another drive but have had no luck. I tried running a repair with chkdsk but it found nothing wrong. I'm kind of at a loss on where to go from here.

[CimmerianX]

I take it there are no historical backups either?

What kind of files are they? PErhaps the important ones can be repaired.

[Phaelax]

It sort of became a garbage folder over the years and I was in the process of copying the data over to my NAS for backup.

Most of it are media files, some are digital copies of my DVDs, and while for the most part the files are nothing critical, it would take a long time for me to replace the nearly 500GBs of stuff.

The music I can do without, since I believe it should all be in my iTunes folder on the NAS already anyway. I have a few vaguely named archives, so I'm not entirely sure what they contained and therefore no idea what I'd even be losing.

I managed to backup about 100GBs before the corruption started. Which is the weirdest part to me, since the data was still intact immediately after the restoration, but an hour later it wasn't. And I hadn't written anything to the drive, only read from it.

[Phaelax]

Ok, there is a folder of photos I would like to try to recover that I cannot replace. Everything else I can do without. Some of the photos are intact, others only partially viewable.

[CimmerianX]

For file recovery, I've used a hex editor on the raw disk to search for image headers, then recover a fixed amount disk space after the header.

For example, my tool is winhex, I've had it for years. You can let the utility access the raw disk, then using a built in feature, let it find all headers starting with hex 45786966 or 4A464946. Then specify the size of the data to recover, 4 mb should be fine for most pics. This will output a folder with a list of 4 mb files it fould starting with that header. Open each file in photoshop and save it back to a jpg, this will trim off the extra space for smaller files.