That's a good idea for us to send Steve some CDs, unless he's got a wife who's going to get suspicious when he gets 20 CDs in the mail all of a sudden.

I expect it will take a while to determine whether any of his files are recoverable. Most of them probably cannot be recovered without special hardware. For documents that he edits frequently, there may be deleted copies left on the hard drive that can be recovered with conventional data recovery software.