The thing is I cannot locate this backup, but I do have the phone, does anyone here know of any good software to scan the phone with, the phone was wiped at some point so needs to be pretty low level kinda stuff... 
Any hope of doing this or am I wasting my time?
Disk Drill, Recuva, Dr.Fone for Android/iOS are some of the good recovery tools you can use but they are not free if you want to use their premium features, I tried Dr.Fone a while ago but not the premium one but I think its a good one, but still, recovering data is not that hard, you can seek some specialist to recover data for you, maybe you could find some expert here. I suggest you to make a thread of a bounty on the service page, as a little reward for the expert will do the work for you.Any hope of doing this or am I wasting my time?
If you are OK with it, besides it, recovering data by yourself, while having no technical skills might cost you the least chance that you had if you would have chosen to hire an expert. I hope you got my point, I can understand you must be under some pressure and excitement too, so in these feelings don't give your seed phrase or keys, etc. to anyone, which means don't do anything dumb.