Recover data from HD

Ideally, you would restore from your Time Machine or other backup...

Professional data recovery is not cheap and often can't recover much, if anything.

If the drive was encrypted using File Vault, there is no way to recover anything from it at all without a backup.

Are you telling us you don't backup? If that is what you are saying you are going to have a painful experience. If your HD is fine and the computer failed due to some other reason, you can remove the HD and put it into an enclosure to recover your data. If the HD is dead, then you likely have lost your data. As stated, data recovery services are available but are EXTREMELY expensive, very common to go into the 5 figure + range.

This is why backing up a computer is essential to safeguard your data. Many experienced users create redundant backups, why because backups can fail too. Don't laugh, it's happened to me.

Time Machine is preinstalled on all Macs and only requires an external HD such as a OWC Mercury Elite Pro which are pretty inexpensive. So really there is NO reason to not backup.

Best of luck.

This is why many of us use redundant backups. It is important to use high quality equipment too like the OWC brand external hard drives. By redundant backups what many of do is we have 2 external HD's for backing up. I use Time Machine on one drive and on the second I use a bootable clone app. The cloning apps you can select from are either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, both do the same thing so it's really down to which one you prefer.