That Jean Jacket would be absolutely massive

Usually the issues with hard drives come from the heads. If the head is parked and the drive is not spinning, it can handle a bit of abuse before breaking. If the drive is plugged in and spinning then it becomes fairly fragile, even though most drives know to park the head in case of a fall. Also, in any case it's always better to have a backup of your data, just in case.

Well, that's pretty much her natural state, she's an anxious cat

I've been using feralhosting for several years now, and it's great. You can setup a bunch of stuff on your slice, like the *arr suite and the bandwidth is way more than enough for my usage. The support is also fairly helpful granted you've read the documentation first, which can be a bit lacking on some of the issues I've had to troubleshoot. But most of the time it's because I'm an idiot who reads diagonally. So yeah, highly recommend feralhosting.

I mean, that's understandable, outside is scary

In French we have liaisons, where in basically every word ending with an s followed by a word starting with a vowel, the s is pronounced "z". For instance, mes amis (my friends) is pronounced "mez amis" instead of "meh amis", des oiseaux (some birds) is "dez oiseaux" and not "deh oiseaux". One of the many things that makes French hard to learn for foreigners.

Hey man, sorry you feel that way... You've probably heard it before, but suicide is a definitive solution to temporary problems. I hope you can find the courage to take the first step and ask for help before it's too late. I don't know where you live but there are probably hotlines or government run platforms to give you the resources you need. Best of luck to you...

That's her full name yes, Copycat

Bonus pic

It sounds like your partition table is corrupted. Recreating it (with parted or fdisk) shouldn't affect the data. Also, I believe that if it shows up as a block device, you should be able to copy it with dd. dd can write to another block device or to a file (like an iso).

Based on an experience similar to yours, I can tell you need to be honest with your intentions and feelings (with yourself first and foremost, and with your crush afterwards).
A friendship in which one side wants more than the other is usually not healthy and not viable in the long run. That builds resentment and regret.
Keep in mind that a lot of women are put in uncomfortable positions when faced with a situation like this. It can make them feel used and the longer you wait to be honest with your intentions, the harder the fall will be for both of you.

Even though Arch is very well documented, it's not really accessible to newcomers. The documentation assumes that you know the basics, so if you don't, you're screwed. Mint, Pop! and Debian, to some extent, are much more accessible.