Did you backup any of the files?

Yes but the external portable hard drive is now corrupted

May God bless the suffering people and nation of Ukraine !

sometimes a computer whiz can recover a crashed drive or a corrupted flash drive

Yeah, unfortunately your next step is to find some local computer guru to see if he can help you recover any of the files

There are several on line services that will recover files for you. There are also several software companies that you can purchase their recovery software to do your self. I have used both in past years with good results. I now keep three backup sources, and think that is the best way to go

i agree... it sounds like your best option may a computer geek with tools to extract data. I'm not familiar with the recovery software or services @Terry53029 mentioned. My daily backups are stored on 4 independent devices. 

We use portable hard drives for automatic backups and then have Carbonite as a backup to the backup.