I lost a lot of my early computing history when I had everything on an external NTFS hard disk became corrupted. School projects, early Game Maker games I worke

I lost a lot of my early computing history when I had everything on an external NTFS hard disk became corrupted. School projects, early Game Maker games I worked on, first music collection. The worst part is it was probably trivially recoverable with Photorec, but I had no idea that existed or how to use it at the time, so I just formatted the drive and went on with life. Wish I had left it alone!