Had a freakish occurrence -- or a demon, you choose -- but it did give me a reason to try a few file recovery apps. Several giveaways that I'd picked up this year & last turned out to be no longer activated, while one, Puran File Recovery, crashed 1/3 of the way done scanning. iCare Data Recovery Pro was still activated, but turned out to be useless. The ol' standby Recuva, which I've recommended myself on occasion, worked somewhat, but not that well. In fact, EaseUS Data Recovery [the older v. 9 that was a GOTD] beat it hands down.
That's Not to say that what EaseUS Data Recovery gave me was anywhere near what I'd hoped for. Searching for file types, e.g. *.vhd, was the only real way of finding what I wanted -- when I recovered those files they were often buried in a longish directory or folder tree that was completely wrong, which is why I never would have found them without searching. Unlike Recuva, EaseUS Data Recovery didn't give me the odds that a file could be successfully recovered, & a couple of recovered files did not work. Bear in mind however that I was using that older v.9 -- they're up to 12 now, which may give better results.
The scans themselves took 3.5 - 4 hours, which is why I didn't try more recovery apps -- the whole thing was fairly painless, since the scans ran in the background, but after 18 hours or so of scanning, I got tired of it frankly, calling it quits. If there was anything I absolutely had to have, I would have continued, but I had recent enough backup copies that would let me get to there from here.
My strategy, FWIW, has always been based on risk/reward analysis... Figure how much time & effort it would take to maintain a completely up to date backup vs. how much time & effort would be required to bring an almost up to date backup to fully up to date status. Though it doesn't apply in this case, a very simple example would be: if the only thing on your system that changed since the last full backup was a software update that took around 3 minutes to accomplish, spending 20 - 30 minutes creating a new backup after that update would be a waste of at least 15 minutes of your time. In this case I didn't want to spend more time trying to recover files than it would take to recreate or update them from what I did have.