0 Byte Files

Recuva
1

My external drive kept giving me the need to format before being able to use message, but having been able to recover it before (years ago), I went ahead and formatted it, making sure to have the Quick format box checked. 

i ran Recuva and it was able to “recover” a long list of files, but there was no folder structure and all the files were 0 bytes, so they weren’t really recovered. What do I do now? Try again?

2

To recover the non-deleted files from a drive that has had to be reformated takes a different process then the usual recovery of deleted files.

See this for a step by step guide on how to do it (and a link to a video that shows it being done):