Given the importance of the data I had lost accidently, I chose to contact a professional data recovery expert, which happened to be Datarecoverusa.com– mainly because of their years of experience in the data recovery field.
datarecoverusa engineers managed to recover 92% of the files, leaving 8% as 'partial' files – I could still access some of these files with the help of the engineer.
I received my data on a new hard drive, with the files separated into different folders. To my surprise, the files were in my usual, beautiful order, which made it easy for me to sort through and check if I was missing anything important, thanks to datarecoverusa.com