Most likely what you have are parts of "older" versions of that file. This isn't bad, as there is likely still a difference to you between an old version and nothing at all.

Luckily I included timestamps in files and they're mostly sequential ... grepping for the last timestamp it appears at most I've lost 4 hours

So this is eliminating more stuff I know for sure i already have 

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Path::Tiny qw/ path /;
use File::Find::Rule qw/ find  /;
use autodie;
use Digest::MD5 qw( md5_hex );

my $qphotoreclog = 'qphotorec.log';

$qphotoreclog = path( $qphotoreclog  )->realpath;
chdir path( $qphotoreclog )->parent;


my $notit = '';
for my $unwanted ( find( file => maxdepth => 1 , in => 'D:/' ) ){
    next if  not -T $unwanted;
    $notit.=path( $unwanted )->slurp_raw;
}

my @files = sort glob 'myfinalfiles/*';
my @maybeit;
my @notit;
for my $file ( @files ){
    my $isit = path( $file )->slurp_raw;
    if( $notit =~ /\Q$isit\E/  ){
        push @notit, $file;
    } else {
        push @maybeit, $file;
    }
}
dd( 'notit', @notit );
dd( 'maybeit', @maybeit );
dd( 'files', int @files );
dd( 'notit', int @notit );
dd( 'maybeit', int @maybeit );

path('myfinalmaybeit')->mkpath;
for my $file ( @maybeit ){
    path( $file )->copy( 'myfinalmaybeit/');
}
__END__
...
("files", 6341)
("notit", 4294)
("maybeit", 2047)
18M     myfinalmaybeit

[download]

randomly viewing a few file, i found a file that seems to be a mix of wanted and unwanted, ugh

In reply to Re^2: stitch together text file recovered by photorec/testdisk? by Anonymous Monk
in thread stitch together text file recovered by photorec/testdisk? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.