@Charles1952, the files you have recovered from hard-drive would have exactly the same content as if you would click Backup button within Manager. So you did it right up to this point.
The reason why Manager complains the file wasn’t in the correct format was that it was simply not recovered by recovery program properly.
If file would be damaged in a small way, then Manager would try to fix it. If Manager complains about the file not being in the correct format, it means the whole file is probably bunch of random characters. Basically the recovery program didn’t recover anything (except for the filename which is not important at all).
I’m afraid you will need to reconstruct your records from scratch. Do proper backups from now on and don’t rely on recovery programs. They are not reliable.