Lost footage, recovered, now a mess

I have a gazillion DNG's now all compiled into ONE folder, and it is supposed to be like 50 seperate folders. It is shot in RAW 3:1. My Harddrive unplugged improperly, and files went missing. So I used Easeus recovery program and got my files back. Now they are all jammed together. Im wondering if anyone has ran into this problem, or has a simple'r' solution.

Be glad it's only 50 folders! I've seen some trainwrecks where it was a dozen TB' worth of footage all scattered across two or three crashed drives.

A couple of ideas:

1) you could just sit there and sort them by file name and manually create new folders that would hold each specific scene.

2) hire an assistant editor (an idea I'm fond of) and let them struggle with this for a couple of days.

Assuming this is already deep into the editing process, you'll have to be very careful about making sure everything retains the correct name and structure so that it can all still work with your existing list.

My advice for whenever anything sad and tragic happens in post: use this as a learning experience so you'll have backups next time. Everybody in post goes through a disaster like this, but if you're lucky, this will be the only time. Next time, you'll have a backup and will just plug that in and move on.

Thanks Marc. The bit of encouragement helps, and yes it is a massive learning experience and eye opener as to workflow, cost of my videos, etc. Definitely grateful I only need to find about half a tb to sort through after finding the correct footage from 6tb.. im on the right track though!

Marc, or anyone with info, what would happen if I'm able to restore the hard drive to an earlier date that was AFTER the footage was put on the hard drive.

Depends on the recovery software. If you're restoring the entire volume from a proper backup, it should be organized correctly. If you're using some file recovery tool, you will have similar problems.

right. well the "proper back up" would just be windows asking me if i want to restore the hard drive to an earlier date.
I have started using a file recovery tool, and for some reason it is saying that it found 6.18 TB of DNG's when its only a 4 TB hard drive?

Forget easeus, I just got wondershare data recovery and it covered everything with proper names and folders. Yay!

Forget easeus, I just got wondershare data recovery and it covered everything with proper names and folders. Yay!

Wow, that's fantastic news. Definitely learn from this experience and do real backups on local drives. These will save you.

absolutely Marc. I have been under pricing myself and couldn't even really afford back ups! Huge learning experience and price adjustments. Rookie of the year goes to!! lol