The mistake of the OP was to not buy the new drive right away and copy his data locally. No basement rack needed, just a USB hard drive. They wrote about owning

The mistake of the OP was to not buy the new drive right away and copy his data locally. No basement rack needed, just a USB hard drive. They wrote about owning multiple drives and having collected data over the course of 30 years, so they weren’t completely nontechnical either.