title: Saving data recovered from a hard drive that crashed - how to sort out current from tmp and old files
body: <p>I recently lost access to my Seagate eSATA HD after my Mac froze up and I had to do a hard shut down of both the Mac and my eSATA drive.</p>
  
  <p>When plugged in, OSX says I must initialize the disk before use (Windows says the same thing, but uses the word "format"). I figured out the drive is now in RAW format.</p>
  
  <p>I found a nifty little program called Recover My Files, (which cost a cool $69.95, far less than professional data recovery services) and ran a scan on my drive. It found what appears to be all of my files, but it doesn't look quite like what it did on the drive. Several top level directories are gone, and their content folders and files just spread out in the list.</p>
  
  <p>All of this is OK by me, but when I try to save the files to another location, the software says my selected files take up 2.43 TB of space to save! The eSATA drive itself was only a 500 GB hard drive, so I don't know how it could find 2.43 TB to save. And I had only used around 350 GB of space on the drive.</p>
  
  <p>I did go through and found it had several duplicates for many of the files, that looked like maybe older versions or temp versions (with a ~ in font of the file name). I'm not sure how all these files could fit on that drive, but maybe I am misunderstanding something.</p>
  
  <p>Anyhow, I want just to save the correct files. A) I don't have space for all that stuff, my max to copy to is 500 GB (minus used space), and B) I don't want to have to sort through all of those files to get the one's I need (assuming there are tons of dupes in there).</p>
  
  <p>Anybody have any experience with this Recover My Files software, or my similar scenario to give me some help?</p>