Sorry to read about the problems you are having.
I know all about the woes of external hard drives, having had 4 fail on me.
Seagate / Western Digital / Maxtor & Freecom.
Freecom lasted the longest at just over 1 year, and the other three lasted a combined total of 1 year, with Maxtor lasting less than a month lol.
All were well looked after, and neither were in mobile use, they just sat on my desk.
Roll on the day solid-state fast high capacity externals become the norm.
Until then I won’t ever trust an external!
Of course not everyone has a choice I guess
I hope you manage to rescue your stuff, as I know the pain in losing movies that werent backed up!!
Looking forward to those releases