Actually, the hard-drive has been sent to two companies that specialize in data retrieval and both failed and did not collect their fees of a few thousand bucks.
Then the blame lies (perhaps) with Seagate, or Hitatchi, or Maxtor, or one of the other half-dozen companies that make hard drives. Those drives go into both Mac and PCs, fail on such at exactly the same rate, and are recoverable / not recoverable at exactly the same rate.
You have to backup, and you occasionally have to verify that the backup system works, BEFORE you need it. Anything less is IT incompetence.