Can you better describe what you did to "initiate a low level format".
Assuming that the first part of the disk has been erased by overwriting it, testdisk probably won't help much, but you will probably have some luck with Photorec (Part of the same suite of tools). Photorec won't recover names of files, but it scans the disk for file signatures and trys to recreate files - which is quite good for things like photos, but works on other documents as well. [ How well it works depends on fragmentation and other considerations ]