I have had external rotating hard drives abruptly make a grinding noise and become unrecognizable by the operating system, even without physical trauma. Drive failure is a matter of "when" not a matter of "if." Definite bummer. Failing drives sometimes can have content rescued via specialized software when detected early, but that requires preservation of recognition/communication with the operating system. Sounds like your drive is past that stage.
A backup drive is used for keeping copies of files that reside on another (main) drive (internal or external). Quickest image recovery would be to make fresh backup copies from the main drive. Good idea to get a new external drive (pretty affordable now) and run your backup routine again. Right away is best.
If the "backup" drive was actually an external storage drive with no other copies of the images available on other drives, the situation is not so good. I learned that lesson the hard way back around 2007. There are companies that sometimes can recover data from malfunctioning drives. My understanding is their services can be expensive, and they have limits on what they can do. Best wishes and lots of sympathy.
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