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When you say "fix it" I assume you mean recover the data. I wouldn't carry on using a potentially knackered drive.
I've used ddrescue https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ with some success before. You'll need a space at least as big as the HDD you're recovering from to create an image of the drive.
I use Onedrive for backing stuff up but that's because I need Office. I pay about £40 a year for 1TB. Whatever you use, it's worth looking at what you want to upload and your upload speed and seeing how long it may take. It could well be much more than a week, I worked out to back all my stuff up would be 8 months. http://www.meridianoutpost.com/resources/etools/calculators/calculator-file-download-time.php
aggi
@J0nathan
My Western Digital 'mybook' 500GB external hard disk is really playing up. Have run checkdisc on it a few times but it either says it hasn't worked or it just hangs. All the files are there, but only some of them can be viewed/opened, the others you can see, but it's as if they are some unknown, low-size file type. Other files names have become strings of random characters.
Question one: Any advice on how to fix it, or if there is someone I can pay to come over and fix it?
Question two: Hoping that I can recover everything, this motivates me to get a proper back-up solution in place. Any advice? What would be good is an external SSD that can be automatically mirrored online. The drawback is that I have very low upload speeds, but I suppose I could just leave it on for a week or so for the initial upload.