Wiped saved game days - help!
@pancakesonly99 The only file necessary to load a save is the save itself. There are a few mods that add extra files, to store user-specific preferences, to the saves folder as well, but not having those files present shouldn't make your sims disappear, and if you do use these mods, simply reinstalling them should be enough to allow saves to load.
So I think it's much more likely that your saves themselves are corrupt beyond the game's ability to read them properly. It's the unfortunate result of using data recovery program. These utilities can never recover every byte of data, so they guess or leave some fields blank. This is fine for text documents or spreadsheets—you might need to manually correct a few things, but the files overall are usable—but not for Sims 4 saves. I've seen a number of other players in the same situation, and none of them have been able to recover their saves to the point of playability.
The only suggestion I can offer here is to load each save in turn and see whether you can find any played households to save to your library. If they do save properly, you could place them in a new save and preserve most of the sims' data. You might also be able to use a mod to export sim data, as mentioned here (disclaimer: I haven't tried it and don't know how it works, just that people who do know say it does).
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Game-and-Mod-CC-Issues/Reading-save-files/m-p/12901838#M47268
But if that doesn't work, then there's really nothing else you can do, sorry.
