Re-do a recovery operation?

I'm sure this is hopeless, but: I accidentally (long story) deleted an entire hard disc full of music, carefully curated, with an elaborate file system.

Then I recovered everything with Recuva, but forgot to click the "restore file structure" box beforehand. So now I've got an enormous flat list of files which I can never conceivably hope to get organized the right way again.

Is it possible to undo a recovery somehow, so I can re-do it with the box ticked? Or if I delete the files now and restore them again, can it replicate the old file structure?

This is a huge deal to me, so please, no lectures about backing up. Suffice to say several improbable things went wrong in the exact right order to screw me.

You can repeat a recovery until you're blue in the face, unless you're recovering to the same device. So if you haven't written much, if anything, to the music file disk then just redo the recovery. I would hang on to the previous recovery if you can until you are happy with your results, just in case.

You can repeat a recovery until you're blue in the face, unless you're recovering to the same device. So if you haven't written much, if anything, to the music file disk then just redo the recovery. I would hang on to the previous recovery if you can until you are happy with your results, just in case.

Thanks for the reply, Augeas. Pardon me if I'm a little dense.

The drive in question is an external drive (I:, as it happens). I erased all the files off of I:, and then restored them back to I: (w/out the file structure, grr).

So, given that the files are now already "undeleted" ... how do I run the recovery again?

(I have a brand new external hard drive I could run the recovery TO, I just don't understand the mechanics of how I re-run it.)

Unfortunately it is too late. I wasn't aware that you had recovered (i.e. copied your recovered content) back onto the problem drive. This will have overwritten just about all the old content, and a further recovery to restore the directory structure isn't possible. I don't know any way in which the original directory information would have been kept.

If you had recovered to another disk and left the original disk untouched then you could have run the recovery again. I guess all you have left now is a big project.

Unfortunately it is too late. I wasn't aware that you had recovered (i.e. copied your recovered content) back onto the problem drive. This will have overwritten just about all the old content, and a further recovery to restore the directory structure isn't possible. I don't know any way in which the original directory information would have been kept.

If you had recovered to another disk and left the original disk untouched then you could have run the recovery again. I guess all you have left now is a big project.

Blarg. Thanks for the info.