Ok I think it's important to give an update to my problem here

I think my external hard drive is failing on me. How do I know? It's giving me a beeping sound from when I plug it in. I searched up the problem and seems like my hard drive is starting to fail on me, which is kinda bad.

How old is it?
Well I bought this while I was in college, and I graduated college in 2014. I don't remember exactly when I bought it, but I know it was over 10 years ago.

When did this problem started?
Today. Some hours ago. It was on my desk in its normal spot but some water got onto it. Didn't get drenched but it was on top of it. I was working afterwards but started to give that beeping problem soon after. Tried to restart my laptop and unplug and replug the cable to see if that would help. It helped a few times but now its just beeping for a few seconds til it stops. My laptop doesn't recognize it when its beeping.

How bad will this affect your art?
I think none so far but I have good news and bad news on that.
Good news is that I can normally work on my art without the hard drive
Bad news is that I cannot access my drive for any of my references and art that's stored on the drive, or any other stuff that's on my hard drive. Plus my list of people that have asked me for a commission when their turn is next x.x

So yeah, so far it sounds like I need to either figure out who can fix my hard drive nearby and think about getting myself a new hard drive to safety precautions, just to make sure if the current hard drive does gets fixed but on a short lifespan after that. I really do hope that I recover my files cause if I cannot, I can say goodbye to all of my art I've saved and gift art I've recieved x.x;