Some months ago I bought a WD easystore 16TB drive to store some archives I've downloaded. I use both Linux (Pop OS) and Windows on my desktop, so I formatted it as NTFS. Because it is NTFS, I needed to run a terminal command or two to get it to mount in Pop OS, but nothing too complicated.
That worked fine for a few months, but at one point when I tried to reboot my desktop, Pop OS got stuck during shutdown because it was unable to unmount the drive. I couldn't find a way to make it unmount, and I had an urgent task to complete, so eventually I did a hard reset. Since then the drive has been unusable in either OS, all the hard drive repair tools I've tried are unable to interact with it even for basic diagnosis.
Obviously shutting down a mounted drive is not good practice, but I was surprised by how fragile my backup solution turned out to be. If I want something more robust, what's the next logical step? Would it still be vulnerable to this sort of issue?