Had a 1TB protable HD that I bought around 2010 for 10k. Used it to backup each of my laptops as those filled up and then purge the files that have been backed up. Went through at least 3 laptops in the mean time. All backed up before the next.
Forgot about the disk for many years. Then found it a few days back. Thought the disk might have crashed. Tried to recover it. Linux can't read. Gone? NTFS filesystem. Finally fixed it connecting to a Windows machine and running "chkdsk /f". Well all the files are there.
Of course there's nothing of important other than old camera photos and videos, these were the most valuable ones as these images weren't backed up anywhere else. And the second most interesting are memes, PDFs and other interesting stuffs that I saved to disk over the decade. Overall 70 GB of stuffs in there.
Going through these is like reading a history.