Just wanting to give a quick update to people. My artwork is safe and the whole thing is backed up.
So what happened was the usb converter in the external drive was fried from a power outage. The drive itself worked just fine, but the bit that connects it to the computer stopped working right. So they cracked open the case and just transferred the data from the drive itself. They even gave me back the old drive so I have a spare 1.5T mini drive just hanging around haha.

So yep, everything is safe and sound. Expect artwork soon!
I got to find what I still had to upload. There are a lot of files...