An important detail that hasn't been mentioned thus far is how file deletion is (usually) done on SSDs. It is different than the traditional, spinning-disk, hard disk drives (HDDs).

As mentioned in AJ's answer, traditionally when you "delete" a file the operating system (Windows 8 in this case) simply tells the hard drive that the file is no longer needed and the hard drive marks that file as unneeded but doesn't actually remove the data. This is a "logical delete." Actually removing the data is a "physical delete." With file-recovery software you can recover a "logically deleted" file because the data may not be gone yet.

However, SSDs have a featured called TRIM which immediately follows a logical delete with a physical delete. This improves the performance of the SSD, but comes with the cost of making file recovery impossible. I don't use Windows much, but from what I can tell this feature is enabled by default.

Because of this the "files" that were recovered are almost assuredly just filled with junk and there's no remnant of the original data left.

You can check if this feature is currently enabled on Windows 8 by opening a command line and entering the following: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify which will tell you the value is either 0 or 1. 0 means TRIM is enabled (the variable name is "disabled", so 0 is NOT disabled).

I've made this mistake too. It's a harsh lesson about the importance of proper backups.