I was juggling data around between hard drives to have them set up better, however I messed things up and fromatted a drive when the some of the data was not on another drive. These files are mainly *.dng files from my lightroom catalog. There are quite a few file recovery programs but which would you say is best? I have downloaded the demo versions of a few but don't want to have to try scanning with all in trial mode as this takes ages.
I too have had success with Recuva, but have mainly used it on USB sticks. One major advantage it has over some of the others I've come across, is that it seems to support all file types. Make sure not to install it on, or to recover the files to the HDD you are recovering from though. Every time anything is written to that HDD the chances of recovery decrease. You can run quick scan first, which takes less than a minute on my machine, and if that doesn't work try deep scan. I've never really used it for this kind of thing before though. Good luck