Today was really a great day when I finally caught sight of digital certificates and some images from the experimental tests, even though some pictures inside the folders are indeed missing (attached image) - I'd say about 80% of the data has been recovered. So the saga isn't over yet

If that's the case, I might actually try cloning those remaining 10 GB of data after all; I'm really hooked on this process now.

An interesting detail I hadn't thought of—the application really did ask me whether I wanted to overwrite duplicate files, and I confirmed. If I had left the duplicates there, it would have been good to check whether any of those duplicates were intact.

Regarding the Recycle Bin, I'm not entirely sure, but I think that when it restored the contents, I clicked on an old scientific article image (it displayed normally) that I had deleted a long time ago. It might have remained in an unemptied bin, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, it doesn't matter since that's abandoned data.

When I have some time now, I will try continuing the cloning of the remaining 10 GB of data into the existing kopdiska.bin project saved back then in OpenSuperClone. I might try the mentioned 'Cluster size (LBA)' settings—if I can find and figure out how to adjust that, otherwise I'll drop by the forum again. Then I'll try DMDE, R-Studio once more with the new tips.

This is a very simple adjustment - simply set a higher value instead of the default 128 in the cloning settings. 1024 is half a megabyte per request, 4096 is 2 megabytes. More clusters means higher speed. Values ​​don't necessarily have to be powers of two; these numbers are provided for convenience. After changing this, it's important to ensure that the "slow skips" in the main OpenSuperClone window doesn't increase after each request. If this happens, you need to either reduce the cluster size or change the "rate skip" parameter in the cloning settings from 50 to -1, so the script stops skipping sectors due to a slow response. This is safe, since this data has already been copied to other images multiple times, and the hard drive has withstood it.
This is most likely due to the fact that a corrupted duplicate overwrote the real file, or because only old file entries were found and new ones were not copied. Each such case must be handled manually. Also, due to the fact that some parts of the file system were not copied, some files or folders may not exist at all; folders may be found among the extra files found - with a name like $Folder0021154156. Lost individual files will only be in the general pile of files found by signatures.