So I'm a dummy. While trying to reformat a new thumb drive so that I could migrate the contents of an old thumb drive to it, I accidentally clicked the wrong thing and reformatted the old drive by mistake.

I figured "ok no sweat, I just won't write anything to it and I'll use recovery software - I've done this before." Only problem is, changing the format of the drive has made it so that the recovery software isn't reading the original file structure.

I'm on a 2015 Macbook Pro running macOS 10.14.6

I've tried running a scan in the demo versions of 3 different recovery apps: Disk Drill, Wondershare Recoverit, and EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. All 3 show the same structure: a bunch of folders labelled Archives, Audio, Documents, Pictures, and Video, and each of these is filled with a bunch of subfolders grouped by file type. Some of these files I recognize, but most of them have generic looking filenames and I have no clue where they belong, so reconstructing the original drive structure would be pretty much impossible. The "Archives" folder includes a bunch of zip files with names like "10 files_000048.zip," "1121 files_000052.zip," or even "304 files_damaged_000024.zip." DiskDrive also shows a folder called "Deep Scan - EXFAT" with a subfolder called "Orphans," filled with a bunch of subfolders called stuff like "Lost103840."

My only thought here is to first offload everything from the drive in its current form, and then try reformatting again back to exFAT, and running another scan to see if that restores the original file structure. Is that nuts??

Oh, and to make things 10x more complicated: the drive I reformatted had a Parallels virtual machine on it, and it seems that most of the files I'm seeing are from inside the machine?? Ideally I just want to get the .pvm file back that contains the entire VM, though I backed that up last night so it's not the end of the world if that's lost. There were some other files on the drive that aren't backed up though (probably less than 100), and those are now impossible to find scattered among the thousands of other files the scan is finding (many of them random Windows system files).