Over the last year I opened most of the files there at least once, except for some stuff I forgot about a long time ago, but it’s maybe a gig at most in total. All seemed to work fine.

Does it just happen out of the blue that often? I have an external hdd that’s like from 2011 and it still holds all the data I put in back then. I don’t assume all drives should work like that, but still, I expected the older one to die much sooner than the other one.