Two years ago I lost an external HDD to failure. On it were lovingly arranged folders of my Czech & American actresses. I had other drives that covered Hungary, Russia, France etc, but this put a huge dent in my sense that my collection was almost complete, since I'm not really into new pornstars, its mostly the period 1995 - 2015 that I'm interested in.
When I pulled open the chassis there was a controller & I thought I'd better replace that but I had great problems sourcing this 'controller' on Amazon / Ebay etc... + I didn't know if it was drive itself that was dead. Acronis (great paid for tool, I recommend it) could detect nothing, so I was lost, inactive for 2 years on situation.
Well today I chanced putting this 2TB Toshiba drive into chassis of a 500GB old Buffallo drive. It came up! I'm thrilled. And the old style folder formats you could do so well with XP are all as I left them if I log on with XP machine instead of Windows 10 etc.
What a result!

So if you think you've lost an external HDD, theres always hope.