Software :: Data Recovery From Deleted Folders / Files Are Deleted Via Trash?

I have a MacPro (Intel), and I had my Music folder on a second (non-boot) internal drive. That drive was getting full, so I bought yet another internal drive to put in one of the other bays, thinking to copy the folders to the new, larger-capacity drive. So I bought a 2 Tb drive and transferred all my MOVIES to the new drive, but then went back and deleted my MUSIC folder and emptied the trash. I knew immediately that I'd made a mistake.

I haven't written anything to that drive whatsoever from that moment on, so absolutely nothing should have been over-written. I have plenty of room on the new drive to which I can recover the deleted files. Unfortunately the folder/directory was very large, with over 20,000 files, mostly of podcasts/spoken word stuff, much of which is no longer available or would represent thousands of hours of download time, plus all my digitized folk music from long out-of-print LP records.

You'd think I'd be more responsible with >600 Gb of data! However, fortunately the drive is in good working order, it just requires a good recovery strategy. I know that services that do recovery charge a fortune, and because I haven't written anything to that drive and it still mounts without problems, I'm hoping I can do this myself with a good data recovery software package. Because I am talking about literally thousands of files, it is just too painful to think about editing all the metadata about each file (name, artist, album, etc.), and ideally I would like to recover the files and the file structure so podcasts are recovered as such, etc.

Is this at all possible?

If so, what are the relative merits of File Salvage vs. Data Rescue vs. Kernel for Macintosh (Nucleus Data Recovery) vs. VirtualLab Data Recovery vs. Stellar Phoenix? Is there something better than these--these are the only ones I found on a Web search. Are there any head-to-head reviews of which someone is aware?