This is making my head spin... Please help!

Question

I've been an Apple convert for a little over a year now and I love the devices and the simplicity of the apps...  Until now.  It seems that some things just aren't a intuitive as they appear.  I was unable to find an answer to my multi-pointed question.
I'm using an Intel iMac i3 processor (mid 2011) with a 1 TB drive and iPhoto 11.  Prior to this fiasco I had probably about 20,000-23,000 (about 150 GB?) pics imported into iPhoto.  Things were going great.
Some background...  Skip to the break for the actual questions if you're not into reading my sob story. 
I am pretty paranoid about losing data, although I have never had a catastrophic data loss yet from keeping multiple backups everywhere when I was using PCs.  I could have stuff on my PC at work, on a Windows-based laptop, at home, on another computer, etc.  Pretty easy but not very integrated.  I have been slow to adopt this strategy to Mac because, frankly, it's sort of expensive to do things like this.  Time Capsules and all the various external hard drives for backup are pretty pricey and reliability appears to sometimes be an issue, so I've been carefully resarching things for a little over 6 months now.
My Mac's power supply blew out a few weeks ago and that scared me into action.  I settled on Dolly Drive, a cloud based backup service that has Time Machine capabilities.  From the reviews I read online it seemed to be an excellent solution.  I was going to eventually supplement this with a physical backup/time machine solution, but Dolly Drive seemed to be suitable as a starting point.
I decided that before I backup iPhoto, I should send the Masters folder to Dolly Drive Sync so that I can also download it onto my Macbook.  This is in keeping with my paranoia and desire to keep multiple physical copies of stuff.  I opened the Dolly Drive Sync folder and the iPhoto Library folder and copied the folder into Dolly Drive Sync.  Never having looked into the Masters folder I decided to open it up just to see how the Mac indexes everything, and man, it was way more complicated and impractical for keeping across several machines than I had thought.  I decided to interrupt the transfer by dragging the Dolly Drive Sync folder copy of Masters to the Trash bin and, as is my usual practice, I emptied it right after.
My hard drive started spinning like crazy.  I knew right away that my originals were being deleted off the hard drive.  I really have NO idea why that happened.  It should be pretty intuitive that only the copy of Masters should be deleted and not the original Masters which remained in the iPhoto Library.
So there's my problem.  I've lost about 23,000 pictures and short video clips, mostly family stuff and my young daughter.
Right away I began running File Salvage from SubRosaSoft.  It's been running for about a day now and it's been retrieving some of the photos onto my Macbook, which has been mounted as a network drive.  It's still in process and I anticipate that this will go on for a few more days.  Luckily I looked across a couple of my Apple devices and between my wife's iPad, my iPad, and our iPhones, I was able to retrieve 19,000 photos onto my Macbook (while File Savage is still spinning in the background).  There's still some missing and the ones missing aren't super important.  File Salvage retrieves the original file but not the original file name or folder directory structure, so that presents a problem for iPhoto's indexing.  Similarly the photos I'm retrieving from the iOS devices are being given sequential generic IMG_XXXX filenames which also isn't consistent with the iPhoto database, so that won't be very useful in fixing iPhoto either (at least I don't think).
So here are my questions...
1) In comparing some of the retrieved photos from File Salvage and the ones I lifted off the iOS devices, the iOS versions are about half the size (3MB vs. 6MB for most pictures) and the resolution is slightly less (5000 x 4000 for the originals and 4800 x 3900 for the iOS).  I'm not planning to edit these or spruce them up to be frank, so would you just call it a day and forget about wading through the thousands of File Salvage photos to pick out and put them into the appropriate folders?  Is there something about the iOS versions that a regular guy will miss and can only be found on the originals?  I'd still need to complete File Salvage to retrieve the missing videos...
2) How do I go about re-indexing the iPhoto Library?  When I open iPhoto all the thumbnails are there but when I try to see the picture there's a big excalamation point that tells me the file is missing.  Do I need to delete the entire iPhoto Library (how do I do that?) and create a new one using the stuff I got off the iOS devices?  Is there a way to associate the current thumbnails in iPhoto with the files that I've retrieved but whose names are different and the Masters folder structure is gone?
3) Any way to rebuild the masters from the thumbnails or from the iPod photo cache?  Aren't the iOS pictures I'm transferring now just a version of the iPod photo cache folder?
4) What do I do about syncing through iTunes?  As far as I can tell the photo sync tab uses the iPhoto albums and events.  I'm newish to Mac, so I'm worried about starting up iTunes and having it destory all my iOS devices by wiping them clean through its auto-sync.
My apologies for the long post.  It's kind of a complicated problem and I don't know anyone who knows how any of this stuff really works.  I sure have learned a heck of a lot about Mac in the last few days though!
Thanks to all in advance.

Answer 1

My guess is that it all went wrong here:
I opened the Dolly Drive Sync folder and the iPhoto Library folder and copied the folder into Dolly Drive Sync.
My guess is that you didn't copy but moved. It's the only thing that makes sense.
In comparing some of the retrieved photos from File Salvage and the ones I lifted off the iOS devices, the iOS versions are about half the size (3MB vs. 6MB for most pictures) and the resolution is slightly less (5000 x 4000 for the originals and 4800 x 3900 for the iOS).
Sounds like you're gettting previews rather than the originals.
I'm not planning to edit these or spruce them up to be frank, so would you just call it a day and forget about wading through the thousands of File Salvage photos to pick out and put them into the appropriate folders?
I'm afraid only you can answer that. How important is that information to you? Me? I would, but I'm like that... On the other hand, once they're back in iPhoto you can do there, you don't have to do it first.
2) How do I go about re-indexing the iPhoto Library?  When I open iPhoto all the thumbnails are there but when I try to see the picture there's a big excalamation point that tells me the file is missing.  Do I need to delete the entire iPhoto Library (how do I do that?) and create a new one using the stuff I got off the iOS devices?  Is there a way to associate the current thumbnails in iPhoto with the files that I've retrieved but whose names are different and the Masters folder structure is gone?
That library is toast. Forget about it. To fix it you'd need to rename each file exactly right and put in a folder named exactly right (for the date and time of import)... you're in a 'start over situation'...
To delete a Library: Go to your Pictures Folder and find the iPhoto Library there. Drag it to the trash on the Dock.
3) Any way to rebuild the masters from the thumbnails or from the iPod photo cache?  Aren't the iOS pictures I'm transferring now just a version of the iPod photo cache folder?
No and No.
I'd ask on the forum for your iOS devices for information on the Syncing.
Regards
TD