tried to recover a deleted file and did it wrong

/home/$USER
$HOME

This is where your /home/"your name" is. The person writing the guide obviously isn't aware of BASH variables

what is $?

what would the name of the file be that everything went into?

If you run:

echo $USER

You will see your username. If you run:

echo $HOME

You will see your home directory

How did you try the recovery?
Why is their not a backup of the data?

I did what the page said.
I am looking for what was recovered
there is no back up because I just scanned the photos and was cleaning them when I clicked on delete and not rename.

But that is not the problem right now it's the recovery has used all my disk space and I need to fix that first.

I don't understand why I can't find everything that was recovered to (somewhere) and is using all my disk space up.

Try:

cd; du -sh *

What is the output, please?

$ cd; du -sh *
0 �
4.0K 234 Warrensburg Rd.kmz
28K alsa-info.sh
42G Audio
8.1M Desktop
4.9G Documents
3.4G Downloads
1.9G Dropbox
12K examples.desktop
192K Fanart
0 googleearth
96M google-earth
33M GoogleEarthLinux.bin
195M google-earth-stable_current_amd64
4.0G Music
3.4G Pictures
460K Public
28K Steam
736K stylishsync.sqlite
4.0K Templates
4.0K testdisk.log
30G tmp
6.6G Videos

The tmp folder in your home folder is pretty big.... Try that.

OK what is a tmp file?

in there is a file named .ICE-unix and in there is files named (bin - boot - dev - etc home - lost+found - meada - var ) and the branch out from there
that do look like they may be it
 but I'm not going to delete them not knowing what the tmp is for.
would hate to find out I killed my computer deleting them when I'm on the edge right now lol

What is the output of:

file $HOME/tmp

~$ file $HOME/tmp
/home/bob/tmp: directory

that went nowhere?

Then open that folder and that is maybe where the data is.....

I have been looking but the etc file alone has 319 files in it that branch off to others . and bin has 232 branching off in it.
I did see a file that had a bunch of then cardboard boxes I always forget what they're called. But I can't find them now. clicking into the unknown

any clue what I should be looking for?

Your file will be in there. You haven't told us what tool you have used to recover the data

A simple, scheduled backup to copy to USB avoids the need for all this. You can just copy the file back.

What was the name and directory of the file before deletion?

If it was possible to recover it, then it probably has been put into
/home/bob/tmp/...previous_path.../...previous_name...