I bought my first PC in 1984 and have not lost any data—admittedly, I always do backup. University IT was unable to locate a company that could retrieve said data from the Mac belonging to my friend and the external backup was not operating properly, hence the reason for the loss.
Then they are incompetent, and lacking even base Google-search curiosity. Drivesavers. Drivesavers.com.
IT departments have always been pretty worthless, but if they can't type "Mac data recovery" into Google as I did, then they should be summarily fired. For that matter, your friend, too, if he's willing to allow years of data to be thrown out as the cost of not doing that 5 second search.
I call BS.