"Earlier in the day I used disk drill. It scanned and showed me about 150 media files but asked me to purchase to recover..."
That's the way the file recovery apps (such as DiskDrill, DataRescue3, Stellar Phoenix) work.
You download them "for free", then run the apps to see if they actually can find anything to recover.
If they do, you pay the registration fee, and the program goes to work and recovers the files.
BTW, you _should_ be using a separate drive as a "scratch drive" to which the files are recovered. If you try to recover to the internal drive, some of the deleted files might get "over-written".
If you don't have an external drive, I'd suggest one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
(many items shown, they all work the same, just pick one you like that's cheap, some are only $20)
... and then get a "bare hard drive" (SATA) to go into it. I like newegg.com for a vendor.
Once you have the drive and dock, put the bare drive into the dock, connect it to the Mac and turn it on. It won't be initialized yet, so open "Disk Utility" and initialize it for the Mac. When done, it will mount on the desktop (before you turn it off, drag the icon for the drive to the trash to "dismount" it).
You'll now have the "scratch drive" you need for your recovery.
Suggestion:
Partition the external drive, make one partition as large as the Mac's internal drive. Then use the free "CarbonCopyCloner" app to create a "bootable clone" backup of the internal drive. Get CCC here:
http://www.bombich.com
Very easy to learn and use, and one of the best pieces of software for the Mac, and again, it's free.
This will serve you MUCH better than Time Machine....
