Photoshop Elements :: 10 / 12 - Catalog Backup And Restore Deleted Data

I purchased a new computer today and also purchased PSE 12 (I had PSE 10 running on a different machine/laptop).  On the laptop/PSE 10, I had about 20,000 digital on an external drive (all were tagged according to color, theme, etc via the PSE organizer).  All of the elements were stored on the external drive under a folder called "digital kits".  I used the PSE 10 backup utility to backup my catalog to ease the move to my new machine.  After I performed the backup, I renamed the "digital kits" folder to "digital kits-glw" because I intended to just move the external hard drive to the new computer and restore the catalog to the same path, “E:digital kits”, as I have other software that is dependent upon that path. 

The restore went pretty quickly, and I can see the correct folder structure within PSE 12 Organizer, but all I have is a bunch of blank thumbnails.  Upon closer inspection, the restore did NOT recreate the E:digital kits folder on the hard drive as I expected.  Worse, the E:digital kits-glw folder is virtually empty (just a handful of thumb.db files).  So, it appears the backup process deleted/hijacked all of my files.  (Note:  I did NOT verify the contents of the digital kits folder before I renamed it.)  Tech support is closed until Monday, and I’m just sick over the possibility of losing all that data, so I’m turning to you all.(I have a backup of the data, but without the catalog piece I would have to re-catalog all 20,000 elements!)