[bonk]

I have a friend (it really wasn't me) who dragged a folder onto his external HD with the same name and replaced what was on the HD with some old files. Now he needs to get back what was on the external HD before he wrote over them. It might be remotely possible, but I'm not sure how to do it. It's important as he's spent a lot of time on this project. I'm reminding him now how important it is to backup, heh.

[engaged]

You can download and try (once, you can evaluate it) Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue.

I understand, by all accounts, that it is the de facto data rescue option. It didn't work for me, but then I'd initialised the damn hard drive... muppet.