Narrowly avoiding disaster

Today could've been really, really, really bad.

I have an external harddrive that has everything I have ever created ever on it. I know I'm supposed to have multiple back ups. I originally did but forgot to do it recently and only had one back up and - long story short - everything I've ever worked on is currently on one external harddrive.

GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TODAY.

I plugged it in to access some files and nothing happened.

Silence. No flashy on button. PC didn't recognise anything had been plugged in.

That's fine, that's not completely weird, I'll just plug it into a different port and try again.

Still nothing.

Okayyyy, I'll try restarting my PC, that'll probably help.

Nope. Tried a few other things. No dice. The harddrive was not co-operating with me.

At some point I started to panic because of the afforementioned EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER CREATED IS ON THIS STUPID BRICK, including old art going back to 2006, files for the books I've created, character designs, old story ideas I want to get back to someday, all of the commissions I had in progress. And more and more and more.

And then the thing that always solves all of my problems ever happened: I complained about the issue in a public place. Five minutes later I retraced my steps and tried a new port with the USB cable I'd used originally, and it just worked. Just like that. No hassle. I guess it was just testing my resolve or something.

Anyway, I'm looking into cloud storage to back things up as a secondary option because there's nothing like a near disaster to encourage you to back up your shit.