I have no sympathy for these people. I could, but I don't.
The first rule of data recovery is "restore from recent, and verified, backups". I've been doing same on my systems every 2-4 days, with a multi-tape rotation. I publish my own [link|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/backups.html|backup recommendations], and it's one of the more popular documents on my site.
It might almost be better if consumer drives were of sufficiently low quality that the realities of data loss and recovery were driven home more often. The sad truth is that for most people it's a "friend of a friend" problem, that hasn't directly effected them. And few consumer devices ship with a suitable archival system (though CD-R/DVD-R is changing this, somewhat).
I still like tape.