Good news is I heard back from the data recovery guys, 99.66% of my data is recovered! Now all that's left is transferring to a new drive and mailing it back
I opted for priority so they should be able to upload the folder of .psds I had for the game so I can continue working on it ahead of the drive arriving via mail
Big W!
Just a suggestion, I saw someone already recommended setting up cloud storage for backups, so just incase you prefer having an offline and readily accessible storage form, allow me to recommend using
M.2 SSD Enclosures. They're a lot smaller and easy to bring around.
In some ways it's just like any portable external storage(HDD & SSD), but this one houses a PCIE/NVME SSD, the literal stick, meaning you can just swap another one if the SSD ran out of storage, and you can also slap it directly onto your PC's NVME slot if you need to. If you want to access it from a Laptop and even your phone actually(given your phone can open the files), you can also plug it onto any of those.
The cheapest yet decent M.2 SSD that I'd recommend are from Kingston, the Kingston NV3 usually goes for 55-60USD for 1TB of storage from the stores I've visited. Its max transfer is up to 6000MB/s, although if you want better quality then Samsung is always the best when it comes to data storage.
I'd recommend getting ROG Strix Arion as your enclosure, its whole body is literally its heat dissipator, its almost fully made out of aluminum alloy meaning less heat problems from usage. You might also encounter ROG Strix Arion Lite, they're both basically the same, the only difference is that the Lite version only comes packaged with USB-C to USB-C cable, while the non-lite version comes with the C-to-C cable and USB-A to USB-C cable, as well as a hanging protective holder for the enclosure, No changes in the actual enclosure though, all features are there for both lite and non-lite, so if you already have a USB-A to USB-C cable then you're good with just lite. (Note: not all charging cables are for data transfers, so if you're planning on using your phone's charging cable, the transfer speed will be a lot slower, based on experience the provided cable with the enclosure can transfer around 125-600MB/s for me, and using charging cables limited it to around 20-35MB/s)
In case you're planning on getting multiple M.2 sticks, I suggest getting cases for them, JJC M.2 SSD case is a good one, offering shock and water proof cases, and as for how many sticks it could hold you can just choose from their store.
Wouldn't recommend heavy gaming on enclosures though, haven't tried it(tried light gaming on an old HDD before though), but maybe you can, provided you have a way to cool off all that heat.
But if enclosures aren't your thing, really I'd just ask you to not use HDDs since they do have a short life-span overall because of the mechanical parts as well as the occasional "you dropped me once, now you'll pay by having all your data fucked". SSD are better overall for life-span, speed, and it doesn't easily break from dropping(accidental drop, not "throwing it to the ground" drop).
Sorry for this wall of text :3