I was gifted an external hard drive
Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, Black - HDTB520XK3AA
https://a.co/d/1414AYG
I put my data on it for gaming and music everything was going fine until one day my iMac decided to automatically update itself and then the hard drive stopped mounting to my computer. It is formatted in MAC OS Journal ( I didnt learn until later that there were better formats for it). Naturally I ejected it from the computer and then when I tried mounting it to another mac computer with older softer it still did not work and I noticed that it wiped itself of my data which sucks. I didnt realize how much I didnt know about hard drives until I really did a youtube deep dive and on top of that realized that Toshiba sucks. I am a sims player and music producer so I wanted to store my gaming files and my VST files on a separate device since the iMac I working on only has 256gb until I could afford something larger. When I went into disk utility it just said 2TB instead of the 100GB of files that were on there and it was greyed out completely and ever since then I have left it alone.
I already read online that when having issues with an external hard drive that you shouldn't try to force anything and leave alone until a professional can get to it. So I am looking for reccomendations on anyone that knows any reputable websites that maybe can recover the data or any better har drive brands I can use as I also found out that the type of format, brand, and type of external hard drive it is. I didnt think it back up my data either cause it didnt dawn on me to do so. If all else fails I just have to re download the VST and sims files on something else is just tedious to do so (sighs)