Speaking from experience working on the backend of another forum - When Robin says we're starting fresh, he means FRESH. The forum is starting from scratch due to the accident regarding the old server and its hard drives.
Now - speaking personally as an IT tech primarily and admin/server maintainer on another forum secondarily - it should be possible to get the old forum data from the old server drives, BUT that will take a fair bit of time (and probably money) depending on the level of technical work needed to be done to rescue the data. Whilst it would be nice to get it all back, there likely WILL be a point where the cost-benefit ratio doesn't work in favour of getting the data back.