Back Up
As I suspected, the drive that broke during my vacation was just a broken enclosure. I replaced the enclosure, so now that's working again. But I also bought a replacement drive because there was a really good deal on one ($70 for 1TB (plus a little more for the enclosure, sine I now see the advantages of buying those separately)), so now I have three external hard drives in my room, which is kind of silly. (Counting my laptop, that's over 2TB of storage, nearly 1000 times the storage space of my first real computer, which my family bought just over a decade ago.)