My stomach sank when I read your post Pat. That's a blow mate...sorry to hear it.
Going on what you have posted, I take it that the tech re-formatted your drives, and that they are at least readable. Same thing happened to me about ten years ago. I wanted the tech to retrieve a couple of emails, but he re-formatted the drives resulting in a data loss. He attempted to retrieve the data, but it was a dumpster fire.
Regarding my more recent data loss:
The software I used in an attempt to recover my data was EaseUS. It did a reasonable job on all data related to bitmaps i.e. Photoshop files, BMP, JPEG etc. The downside is that the files are recovered in a single "junk pile" with no file names associated. Each file needs to be opened, identified and saved back out to the original names....if you can remember the names of every bitmap you ever saved.
Other data, specifically data like 3DStudio or GMAX...no joy.
Your compressed files i.e. purchased aircraft or scenery may
or may not be retrievable, depending on how they were formatted. I was able to recover .rar files only, but other compression formats were un-openable.
Good news is your ORBX, Flightbeam, FS Dreamteam, Milviz, Alabeo, Carenado....etc. etc. are all safe and sound on their servers. I was able to re-download all of my purchases...with great effort...but I do have them all now.
Overall, most of my data was "recovered", but in a useless pile of un correlated file types. For example, a typical freeware scenery or aircraft package is made of a collection of different file types, organized into named folders and file caches. The retrieved data is more or less a dumpster full of files of various types with only numerical names. If you had 100 freeware files, all of the contents would be in a common dumpster. The data is basically un-usable unless you are some sort of savant who can re-assemble the quadrillion possible combinations of nameless files in to some sort of working hierarchy. I'm not a savant, so I just put the old drive in the drawer and started over.
The software was reasonably priced, and did extract data so you might want to try to read those drives and save out what you can. It's a tough choice mate.
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