Not having a backup is as stupid as not encrypting it & the master.
I copy to it manually every week or two.
It's a chance to sort out stuff.
wtf if I was to lose a week, but I'll NEVER lose the lot.
I'll also note that many corrupt containers are fine with a little tweaking.
That's been the case on several occassions, even with crypted stuff.
Run everything you can at or in it.
Try windoze chkdsk (tools -> check disk), it can be very GOOD.
Try some other recovery programs too.
If you can SEE the drive you can usually sort out the corrupt file structure
& once you do that almost everything is still there intact.
Run the truecrypt repair stuff if that's applicable.
Best to partition large external drives into 2or3 to make them MORE manageable.