fsck on ext3, lost files

I have Debian/Stable installed on one partition formatted as ext3. Recently,
when booting into my Debian/Stable partition a check was forced
and fsck failed. I was then prompted to enter the root password and run
fsck manually. It was also mentioned that the file system was mounted
read-only and a command was given to remount in read-write mode.

I misunderstood this as a direction to first remount in read-write mode
and then run fsck. I proceeded to answer yes to _many_ prompts from fsck.

Although the file system was then pronounced clean it failed to reboot.
After further inspection almost all evidence of the former file system was
gone. Only lost+found remains.

Lost+found contains over 300 entries numbered #1504387 through #4635638. About
50 of these are directories. One of these directories contains most of my
user's home directory, though many of the subdirectories that I am interested in
appear empty. In particular I am looking for jpeg images.

I have tried recover, e2undel, debugfs, and lde. There was very little I
could recover with these programs.

For example, lde shows:
0x0016F5A2: drwxr-xr-x 2 4096 #1504674

This directory lists many of the subdirectories and files from /home/gary,
for example:
0x00000000: pictures
0x00097D35: -rw-r--r-- 2 179 .jedrc

Is there anything I can do to recover files from these lost directories?

I've read, "Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been
deleted and hope for the best." Is this still true?


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