5 minutes ago, plantsandbinary said:

Is there any way I can restore the metadata? Surely someone else has been in a similar situation, even to a lesser extent.

If you still have the physical drives intact then you could see if specialist disk recovery software such as UFS Explorer on Windows may be able to do a better job of recovering the contents intact.   That software is not free, but you CAN use it for free in scan mode to see what it might be able to recover.   There are probably other software options (possibly even free ones) with similar capability but that is the only one I have experience of using.

 

it is worth pointing out that parity can only handle recovering from disk failures - it cannot handle other issues such as file system corruption that can lead to data loss.  Parity works at the physical sector level and has no idea what is the meaning of the contents of such sectors.   You still need a good backup strategy for any important data since (as you have unfortunately found) there are other ways of losing data than simple disk failure.

Ok thank you so much for the help. Big lessons learned today. I'll give this and a few more things a try and see how it goes. Failing that, maybe I'll send the disks to a data recovery company. It's my entire childhood so money isn't really a factor here.

 

All the data seems to be there but just without its original folder tree structure, metadata and file extensions. Failing that, I'll store the disks away for a few years and who knows maybe 10-30 years from now technology will advance far enough that AI or something will be able to dig through all this and repair it all for me. 😂

 

I've bought 5 new drives to start over. So one way or another these ones are done for using. I won't risk the data getting more damaged than it already has been.