Did you know you had around 200,000 jpeg files on your machine before it wen't kaput? No, neither did I...
You have your data back now, but it's missing all context. My data was important to me. I wanted it back very badly, and I was willing to put in the elbow grease to get it back properly. Note that this process took me around 10 days to complete, and I still find bits of data called 'Recovered_*_file...' to this day.
Windows Explorer will be your friend in this battle against thousands upon thousands of files, so keep things organised to try and avoid any mistakes. Use this opportunity to restructure your PC in a better way; something I had been meaning to do on and off for years.
Adobe Bridge
Windows Explorer works, but it can be slow. Adobe Bridge on the other hand, is a very robust, simple replacement of Explorer.exe. Much like Explorer, you can use Bridge to preview files and folders, but it's much better at it. It can show you a thumbnail of a much wider ranger of file formats. It is much faster to load folders full of thousands of files, and its batch processes for moving files around and renaming them is fantastic. It is also completely free! The renaming function will be your best friend here. It gives you every option under the sun as to how to rename things, and is especially useful with large numbers of files that are all related, such as holiday photos etc.
dupeGuru
A strange side effect of recovering data is that a lot (but not all?) of files, especially photos I found, will have a duplicate or 3 somewhere else. I've had the issue of having duplicate files in the past, but always just tried to track them down and delete them. However when working with so many files, it becomes impractical. Thus, I found this online: dupeGuru. Get it, its free, and a massive time saver! Literally point it at a folder full of photos you're pretty damn sure you've just spotted dozens of duplicates in, tell it to search 'Pictures' (it can do other stuff, but this was by far the most useful to me), and launch it off! It scans the structure of every file and compares them, leaving you with a hit-list of files it knows are 100% copies of eachother, and some others its around 96% - 99% sure on. My suggestion is to arrange the list by %, and manually check the 96% - 99% ones. For me, the 96% ones were close matches but not dupes, so it's your call on those. The 99% sure ones often turned out to be 100% right, so I ended up just spot-checking most of them and telling it to remove the rest. Processing the files is easy. I'd select them all to begin with, then uncheck the ones you don't agree are dupes. You cannot directly delete the files from dupeGuru, probably just in case. Instead, you can move them to a new folder, and then it's down to you if you really do delete them.
The Results
These two applications together allowed me to figure out 99% of the work, and 10 days later, everything was back on track. A heads up on this whole process though, many files were still lost forever. Windows wiped out files I'll probably not notice for years to come until I go looking for X. Other files were successfully restored, but were actually corrupt. This has only happened with .jpg files for me so far. I guess the format can be lenient, so it's still readable but actually scrambled when you look at it. These files would display with green and pink bars and artefacts across them. In these cases, you simply had no other choice other than to delete them. A few .png and .gif files I had looked fine and opened in Windows Fax Viewer or Windows Photos, but Photoshop said something was wrong with them. I expect to be finding these for years to come such is their nature. However they are fully recoverable. Simply open them in Paint. Nice simple, shitty Paint. It seems to open them just fine, then simply resave them, overwriting the file or saving as a new file altogether. After this, they are as good as new!
Looking Forward
Back up everything. There's plenty of backup software out there these days, but ASCOMP's Backup Maker and ASCOMP's Synchredible are both brilliant shouts. They are both fully featured and free. The only time you have to pay for them is if you're a business or want user support, but Google is your friend 99% of the time. Personally I now have a spare 2TB drive in my PC that does nothing but store backups. I started with Backup Maker, but actually found Synchredible to be what I was actually looking for. Read into both of them at your leisure, I go from there. Basically if I add, remove, or edit anything Synchredible is looking at, it will automatically update a backup of it on my other disk every time Windows starts up again. It's great!
Nothing will beat cloud storage though. Think of it like this: worst case scenario, your house burns down or everything gets robbed. Your PC is gone. No matter how many drives you had backing up data, no matter how mnay external drives you had in your drawer next to your pc, all your data went with them. Cloud services mean you could travel to the other side of the world at a moments notice and still have access to your files you need to work. The catch for me and many others is simply uploading that data to begin with. Even uber-fast internet in the UK is slow at uploading unless you're a company that pays for this. It's simply not something providers prioritise for the standard user. But once it's up there, uploading a file here and there at the end of each week is nothing in comparison.
Dropbox is a tad expensive these days, but it used to be my go-to. It always felt faster than OneDrive back when that was in its infancy, but this is no longer the case. OneDrive will give you 1TB of online storage and Office 365 for those that want it for £8 p/m. Not a bad deal. Google Drive will give you double the storage (2TB) for the same price, but no Office 365. I went with Google in the end because all I need is space, and it made sense seeing as my internal backup drive is also 2TB, and so is my external hard drive; all could fit duplicates of the data on them if necessary.
Never rely on a hard drive to not fail, and backup now while it's still on your mind and before it's too late.
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