Make a backup of that drive online somewhere. I had a mostly full western digital brand external 3 terabyte hard drive die on me last March. ALL of my downloaded designs and ebooks and a million photos were on it, most of it irreplaceable. Years worth. Losing that HURT. When I asked my husband if he could retrieve the data off it (he's a computer guru) the first thing he said to me was "don't you have a backup?" I almost killed him. My external drive WAS my backup and my main storage because my laptop only had a 250 gb drive in it (it's an old laptop). And no, he couldn't get anything off that drive
These days I have another external drive.. and everything on it gets automatically and continuously backed up to cloud storage via software called Backblaze as well. It's something like $5 a month and has both Mac and PC versions. I wish I'd had it before that drive died. I lost thousands of dollars of ebooks and music and downloaded embroidery designs and old scanned in family pictures.