I have accidentally deleted a folder with many subfolders and many gigabytes of important files on an external drive. After that, I immediately disconnected the drive to prevent overwriting of data and automatic defragmentation. How can I recover the specific folder which has been deleted? I do not want all files to be scattered after recovery, because there are very many of them. Is there a way to restore the folder with its hierarchy of files if I know what the folder’s title was before deletion?

There are a number of pay-for and free data recovery programs that purport to be able to bring back folders and files with their original names. I have experimented with a few, trying to learn how they work, preserving or not preserving original file names. I just remembered a great place to ask your question:
https://community.spiceworks.com/storage/data-recovery
There are many folks in there who deal with a great number of data recovery questions.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

Spinning drive or SSD?

Tools good at reconstructing file systems are ReclaiMe, R-Studio, GetDataBack, Recovery Explorer. If possible filenames and directory structure is recovered. If the drive was an SSD however file contents may have been TRIMMED.

Preferably recovery is attempted on a clone or disk image.

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

Why are you spamming a another forum on the forum where most of the data recovery industry hang out?

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

Also often recommended : DMDE, UFS Explorer. But in a simple case like this (if the drive was not a SSD as it's been mentioned above), even a good freeware like Recuva could do the job just as well. Just remember to activate the tree view to get the folders / subfolders presentation (by default it displays a list of files with no hierarchy) ; the “quick scan” mode should be enough in such a case of accidental deletion. But if key metadata informations have been wiped then it's also possible that no software however clever and expensive might be able to recover the full directory (it's totally unpredictable, sometimes it's impossible to recover a file that was just deleted while a complete folder deleted two years ago is still entirely recoverable...). It can also happen that the name and original location of the parent folder has been lost, but all the sub-folders and files can be retrieved, in which case the parent folder may appear as an orphaned folder, for instance R-Studio in a situation like this displays the folder under “Extra found files” with a random name like “$$$Folder12345”. With R-Studio, in a case of a simple deletion, you don't need to run a full scan (at least on a Windows NTFS partition), just opening the partition right away is enough to display deleted files and folders (it's equivalent to the “quick scan” in Recuva). Then if you don't find the folder where it's supposed to be, run a search (“Find/Mark”) with a keyword corresponding to the name of a sub-folder or file it's supposed to contain, if it turns out to be an orphaned folder. R-Studio and Recuva have the advantage or preserving all timestamps (including those of folders), which is not the case for all recovery softwares.

hank you for the information. My drive is HDD. I installed [removed by moderator as this software is promoted via spam a lot around here] and was able to recover almost all of the files. A number of them were corrupt or missing after the recovery.

I am not spamming this forum by naming a Data Recovery forum in another place. HDDGURU's Conventional Drives is a wide, vast, thorough, forum covering huge areas of hardware, and of software. A forum dedicated only to data recovery is an additional tool. If someone has critical, important, data to recover, I see great benefits in posting right here in HDDGURU conventional drives, and, in another trueblue data recovery forum.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

Well, let's test that.

It appears OP took your advise: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/ ... forum=2288.

I don't see any added value he got from that place. Labeling a forum 'data recovery' does not mean you will get accurate answers. In fact most of the most dangerous suggestions are often made in data recovery subforums mainly populated by end users. The one eyed's leading the blinds.

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

Arch, I sincerely hope OP ignores any $elling or shrilling! I have not been on spiceworks for some time, maybe things have changed, sadly not for the better? I will revisit, and change my viewpoint accordingly. Again, thanks for the reminders! And, I'm bookmarking your: www.disktuna.com - photo repair service

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

No worries. Yes I went through some of the threads and I am not very impressed though there are some providing answers that look valid and correct. Problem is that every one chips in recommending the tool they probably used once and that saved their bacon. Now while it may have saved their bacon on one specific situation, that's rather thin evidence to base a recommendation on.

I try to keep up with latest versions of most end user oriented tools and when I find the time I run them against some standard test scenarios and disk images. Stuff like DiskDrill and RecoverIt performs so poorly (even against an intact drive with an intact file system!!) that I personally would never recommend it, but you see them recommended typically in those kind of forums.

Very few are aware that companies like Clever Files (DiskDrill) and Wondershare (RecoverIt) are very active pushing paid for reviews: https://www.disktuna.com/wondershare-re ... geeks-com/. Fzakbar has done some nice digging on this topic too, revealing people posing as end users in these forums, recommending software supposedly based on personal experience are probably nothing more than shills.

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

There aren't any known data recovery techs on Spicew#rks. I check in on there every now and then.
Most folks there are all around IT and their level of advanced data recovery is low.
They know about data recovery software in the sense where everybody is throwing in their opinion based on their own results with a particular tool.
A couple of sales/customer service reps from Ontr#ack and Driv#Sav#ers are on there offering folks to send staff in for a free evaluation, plus, of course, the software sales reps that constantly post link to use this and that.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I suggest DMDE:

https://dmde.com/

In the Partitions window, double-click your partition.

Click on "All Found / Virtual FS".

Select "Pure FS Reconstruction" and "include deleted".

Click OK and wait for the $MFT to be parsed.

Expand the $Root and navigate to your desired folder.

R-click your desired file/folder and select "Recover ...".

Note that the free version is limited to recovering up to 4000 files from any one folder.

The paid version costs US$20.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.