That's nice of you to do that for him. I've had the same experience... We had sent our Wii to Nintendo to get repaired(blah), and when it came back, everything was gone. XD They hadn't told us anything about making sure we had a backup of the data(We probably should have done that anyway... >_>). They gave us an extra year on our warranty ... Let me tell you, I spent alot of time playing video games that week LOL!
Currently, I'm trying to get back all the stars in Super Mario Galaxy. It's not as bad as it seems though, since I haven't played it in a while. I figure if I just play each game at a nice pace, things will eventually be back to normal (Can't say the same for my brothers and sisters!). That was maybe about 5-7 months ago? I dunno, but it's pretty much alright now.