I’m having trouble finding a recovery utility that meets my need. Ext4magic and extundelete don’t seem to allow for recovery of a specific directory, only working on the entire filesystem. Photorec can browse directories, doesn’t support ext4. Is there anything out there that can do both?
I believe it’s quite possible that there is no information where a removed file belonged to in exr4fs and it’s ilk; after all they also have concept of “lost and found” files, and files there also don’t have that information. If the directory they were contained in gets overwritten in a form that the file is not there, then the information is likely gone; along with the name of the file.
Just get a secondary device, recover everything you can, pick the files you needed. Consider yourself lucky if you get to restore the file you lost.
Good luck recovering your files! For future I recommend making backups. I use kopia, borgbackup is also popular.