I just wanted to thank the OP for his most helpful post. I accidentally deleted 586 mp3's (from 347 different sub-folders) this afternoon, thinking I was simply removing the files from a playlist when in fact I was (unwittingly) deleting them from my hard drive. I usually make backups, but this one particular song folder changes so often, backing it up seemed somewhat impractical to me -- at least until I saw that I'd lost songs it had taken me a month to collect.
It had been so long since I'd lost any data, at first I never even thought about using Recuva, even though I had it on an old laptop. So I started to put more songs onto the drive from which all the other songs had just been deleted (fortunately, only 4 songs). Then I stopped and remembered about Recuva, and the possibility of maybe salvaging some of the songs. I got the latest version and did a deep scan on the 2 TB internal HD. It took 6 hours, and when it was finished, I followed the directions from this post, and was able to recover 549 out of the original 586 songs. I recovered the songs, in their proper folders, to another partition, checked to make sure everything was correct and that the files played properly, then I copied them back to the original drive.
All in all, I consider the results to have been a HUGE plus, especially compared to the prospect of losing all 586 songs. And, if I hadn't added the 4 songs to that drive before running Recuva, I probably could have recovered/restored even more. But it goes without saying...I'm a LOT happier now than I was this afternoon.
And to celebrate, I made sure the backed up files were totally synced with the originals, and I will continue to keep the backup folder current, so if something ever happens again, I'll have a full backup already in place. Using Recuva to restore accidentally deleted files is great, but nothing beats a routinely updated backup folder. I considered this to have been a warning. And I don't need to learn this lesson twice.