Hi, I've used both DataRescue 3 and File Salvage to restore my media library. My films are able to be restored but not with their title names, making it difficult to sort through again.
Are there any settings I should be using? Any better software that can get this done?"
Simple answer: no.
You're going to have to manually re-name and re-organize the files yourself.
Consider this:
You probably used DR3 or FS because you were working on a drive that had been accidentally erased, or had a partition or directory become hopelessly corrupted. At this point the drive's directory was in such bad shape that the only way to "get at" the data was with a file recovery app (which you used).
Remember that the drive's directory is like a book's table of contents and index -- it contains "pointers" to all the data stored on the drive (an analogy might be the actual printed pages of a book), but the data itself is "out there" on the drive's sectors.
When you use a file recovery app, it bypasses the drive's directory and "goes directly to the platters" to scavenge, assemble and recover the actual -data- of the drive, and then places what it finds on a "scratch drive".
But what is LOST in this process are things like filenames and folder hierarchies -- because names and folders are a construct of the drive's -directory- (which is bypassed), rather than being the actual data itself.
Think of it this way: you want to recover the contents of a book, but you don't have either the table of contents or the index (or perhaps even page numbers) to tell you how to fit the pages back together. You -DO- have all the pages. So, it will take some effort to put everything back in order.
But the consolation is that you do have "all the pages".
That's the way file recovery works.
The end result is -- just be glad you got the data back!
