Need help recovering deleted video from iPad 2

[walchan99]

Okay, I really messed this up, I'll admit.
My wife's iPad 2. She's a Windows user and hopeless at backing up. I had been backing up her iPad to an account for her on my iMac till last year, when I set her up on iCloud and bought additional storage.

As can be expected, my daughter has been shooting video clips with her friends. Not classic, but important memories. 2 days ago, the apps wouldn't update, since the device was out of memory. So I plugged into the iMac, didn't back up (fatal error!), downloaded all the videos onto iPhoto in my account (possibly second error). I could see thumbnails of the videos, so I proceeded to delete the videos from the iPad.

Yesterday, I realised that the videos were not showing up in iPhoto on the iMac. Since then, I've been frantically trying to retrieve. Downloaded a couple of tools (Tenorshare's iTunes Data Recovery & Wondershare Dr. Fone), for both Mac & Windows, but nothing worked. Even booted into DFU mode for iTunes Data Recovery to attempt to read from a Windows machine, but the application would crash within 2% of the read.

After many many hours, bit the bullet and thought of restoring. (Here comes the final blunder). But hadn't turned off iCloud backups, so the backups will have been updated.

So that was the sob story. The questions...
1. Just where did the files go on my iMac? iPhoto did take a while to download each video. Am running a Data Rescue scan as I write, but not sure I'll be able to deal with the volume of search results. A more precise location would help.
2. I have a Time Machine backup for the iMac. Would that help?
3. Is there any way to retrieve the deleted files from the iCloud backup, bearing in mind that the iPad has probably synched the file deletions since.