A dear friend of mine lost an entire directory containing years of pictures. It was called "Archive" an located under the classic "My Documents" folder. He just found it empty, one day, and inside it it found some iTunes related file.

Of course, he had no backup (!).

I helped him recover 40% of his pictures using Recuva.
More files were actually recovered, name and size being apparently correct, but, they are unreadable because they were overwritten to various degrees. You can find one example attached.

So, my question is: what software, if there's any, would you recommend to try to recover the broken files? They're all JPG, and hopefully this could help some recovery software to make at least some sense out of the messed up bits?