Update: took it to a professional data recovery firm. They gave me a free quote and reported that the "read/write head is damaged [with] possible damage on platter surfaces". Worrying, but they say there's a good chance of success. I had to give a $100 advance on the full price of almost
$500, but they say they'll refund everything if they can't recover the data or I'm somehow not satisfied with the service. Around two hours ago, the ticket status changed from "awaiting advance" to "in progress"... we'll see.
Whatever the outcome, learn from my mistake, all of you. I had spare storage for duplicating backups, I just got lazy. To my credit, the disk failed all of a sudden with no previous warning signs, after four years of ownership and around one and a half years of usage (power-on hours). This makes me wonder, what
is a reliable form of keeping backups if an external drive isn't, online storage isn't, you have some 1700 GB of data and can't afford stuff like RAID or multi-bay NAS?
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