This may be a long shot, but that looks suspiciously like part of a TAR file header. Possibly you at one point tried to back it up with tar, and used the same filename as the output file? The reason I suspect this, is because a TAR file header begins with:
char filename[100]; // null padded
char mode[8]; // octal
char nuid[8]; // octal
char ngud[8];
char size[12];
...
So looking at that snippet, it fits the pattern -- file was rw-rw-r, with the owner/group ID 1000, and the size between 200 and 207 bytes (looks like that field is cut of in your cut-n-paste).
The give-away is if the file has "ustar" starting at character 257. In that case, just use the tar command to try to extract from it (in a temporary directory just in case), hopefully you'll get something out of it.
gcc bla.c -o bla.c
?file big.c
- what does it say? Doesn't look good for recovery unfortunately.