Lost My Catalog Files - What Program Can I Use To Successfully Recover?

Greetings,

In attempt to clear space on my mysteriously full MacbookPro harddrive, I made a hasty, poorly considered move and dragged my entire hard drive "Pictures" folder to an external Toshiba drive thinking I'd be able to somehow simply reconnect the files back to Lightroom after the export was finished. Naively thinking - "worst case scenario, if it doesn't work I'll just drag it back!" Two hours later when the export was completed, I deleted the contents of the "Pictures" folder, restarted the computer, and went to sleep which cleared up 450+ gigs from my drive.  The next day,  that new folder on the external drive was grayed out, inaccessible and looked empty. Later I discovered a way to change the date of the folder & gain access, but it still appears to be empty stating zero kb contents. Next, I ran Cisdem recovery and after 3 days appeared to have recovered some files, but proceeded to immediately  lose them again after I accidentally closed the window.  And now the Cisdem program won't work for me at all second time around.   So, going forward, I'm open to any suggestions!    But more specifically, would anyone be able to recommend a recovery program that would work for recovering specifically Lightroom files (on a Mac)?   I read that even if the Cisdem scan had successfully completed, the program would have automatically renamed the files which I assume would have destroyed my ability to re-link them to Lightroom & repopulate the catalog.  (But I don't know?)   I've also read that finding a program for SQL file recovery would be useful, but, this is way beyond my depth, and again, I would appreciate any guidance.  I do have backups of many/most/perhaps all of my photos, but nonetheless, recreating my entire catalog containing several years of work and well over 100,000 files sounds daunting, to say the least, (not to mention re-editing them all again). 

Thanks very much in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.