it is not clear to me if this problem should be something that we can expect to be resolved with this quarterback retrieval program or not.
I've never known anyone to say that Quarterback did undelete stuff. I'd recommend trying to undelete the files with DiskSalv before making it worse by copying files onto the formatted drive. You can at least see the files there were on there (assuming the format wasn't really really effective) before trying to copy them back from the backups. If you don't have them on the backups, then you can go ahead and undelete them.
Really, though, if you have the program disks handy, all you really need to restore are the files people made themselves.