Rebuilding a folder structure lost after restoring from backup

Question

The external hard drive I was storing four years worth of photos on crashed the other day, and I learned the hard way that they weren't on the backup drive like I thought they were. Luckily I was able to recover at least most of them using FileSalvage. Unfurtunately, my ~15,000 images are now in three folders based on file type (JPG, TIF, DNG/NEF), don't have their original file names, and aren't in any particular order.
Is there any way short of manually sifting through the files for me to rebuild the year/month/day chronological folder structure I was storing them in?
I'm running Lightroom 4.0 on a OS X 10.8.4.

Answer 1

One option is to use Smart Collections to have Lightroom automatically put files into collections by either capture date or edit date.  You can create the collections by year, month, day, a range of dates, etc.  If you want to have four years of photos grouped by month, you'd have to create 48 Smart Collections for the 48 months (if you have photos captured or edited in all 48 months).
Then if you want to put them into Folders, just drag the Smart Collections to the appropriate Folders.  But note that this will move the files on your hard drive into corresponding folders as well.