Using Stellar Phoenix to recover lost data

Being new to Mac, my DH dragged a desktop folder to the trash and emptied it thinking it was just a short cut icon like we were used to on the PC. The folder contained our ENTIRE business. What really stinks is that we have the box for Time Capsule sitting on the table. It came today and we didn't have time to install it yet!

We downloaded Stellar Phoenix to try and salvage what we can of our files. It has been running for 5 hours and looks to be only half way done. There was a fair amount of files deleted, but why is it taking so long to recover them? It seems to be looking at every single bit on the computer and not just the files that were trashed.

Luckily, we realized the mistake immediately and didn't do anything on the computer after the files were erased other than download Stellar Phoenix.

What are our chances? It is 4:00am and I am too freaked out to sleep.

Leave it to run.

The app has no clue whether you want it to find a single 10MB file or 100GB worth of files.
Neither you nor the app have an inkling of where on the drive the data you want to recover was stored either.
If it is doing it's job correctly, it is searching every sector on the drive.

Oh, I'm not touching it! It is almost done. There is a zip file sitting in the previously empty trash and it is searching through all the unused space. It should be done in about an hour or so. Then we see.