How do I recover files from a cloned but older external drive?

A few months ago I cloned one of my external drives where I keep some of my video files.
Shortly after that I got a new 3 TB drive, I promptly did a lot of file reorganizing within iMovie (because of misdating issues I was correcting from earlier), and also lots of new iPhoto movies had been imported. (This will screw things up later, so is relevant.)
Then, to make things worse, after moving things within iMovie, I copied all the files from one drive to the other because one of the drives was too full.  I have lots of drives, and I had just got this HUGE drive, so I wanted to move things from the 500gb drive to my 1T drive.  I had THOUGHT everything was fine, because the visual inspection showed all the folders.  Only later did I discover that it was only the folders/directories that had copied, not the actual movies.
And then went on vacation. While on vacation, there was a power outage, and my backup drive died. When I came back I discovered the problem. I can't even check to see if the "backup" (which I had actually made first) had the movies still because it doesn't appear to be recoverable. 
SO, long story short, here is my question.  From my original CLONE, how do I salvage my files?  I can't just use that one instead, it didn't have all my files, since it wasn't all inclusive to start with, and I've added new files since. Also there has been an iMovie update since it was created.  Can I just open the drive and drag over the folders? Or import them somehow. 
Sorry for being dumb, but I don't use iMovie very often. I had imported movies years ago, so long ago I don't remember how I did it, and since then iPhoto has just been bringing in my movies for me.
Please help. I'm feeling like a very bad mom right now. I've lost everyting since 2007.

Ok, I've been digging around while waiting, and I'm wondering if I didn't copy things wrong at all, and possibly if the issue was caused by the fact that I RENAMED the hard drive when I reorganized things, and iMovie dropped all my files because of that?  Regardless, my question is still the same.  *** do I do now?
At this point I have 3 hard drives with files on them. 2 of them are fine. On of them has no files, but a bunch of empty events showine me where files should be.  I have a clone that has those files, along with a bunch of files I don't need because they are already on those other drives.  I don't mind having duplicates I can always delete them later.  If I boot up that clone, how do I get  those files onto my 3rd drive?

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