Many of the indirect blocks on the filesystem were hosed, so a big, big chunk of data cannot be organized back into a coherent chunk. sigh Making things worse is that there’s a filesystem-in-a-filesystem, because the backup image has an older backup image in it. So even with indirect block searches, there’s no way to know which filesystem’s block offsets you’re looking at. Foremost is the tool that scanned the data and recovered a goodly many of my pictures.
For the future, everyone should be using XFS, and regularly running xfs_fsr which comes from the xfsdump package. It reorganizes a file’s blocks so that they are contiguous. Apparently it’s a daily cron job on IRIX. Make it part of your life on Linux.