Disk not recognized after accidentally disconnecting USB

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

So, I was exporting a movie off of my 2.0TB My Passport for Mac using the program Final Cut Pro, when the baby in the office pulled the USB cable out of the computer.  So, I tried reconnecting and got a window that says, “the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.  Initialize, ignore or eject.” 

Well, since I have projects for several students  on this hard drive and one client, I’m not about to initialize.  Naturally ignoring and/or ejecting gets me nothing.  Is it truly possible that simply disconnecting the USB by accident can result in this catastrophic failure?  No doubt, I’m only supposed to use my external hard drive to back up files.  But teaching media production at a community non-profit with all used computers and no money for extra memory, a 2TB external hard drive seemed like a workable solution.  Does anyone on this forum have a solution other than always back up your projects and project files three times lest one of the children of the single moms that you’re teaching pulls the cord out by accident.  Sorry for the rant.  I don’t have the money to fix this problem and I fear a lot of really good media training is going to be lost in the process.

2

The drive data was corrupted or the partition was damaged, especially if you were copying something over when it happened.  Check the drive in Disk Management, if it shows up there, and I bet it will, you can try going online to find a partition recovery software, that might restore the partition and thereby your data.  If the data is corrupted, you most likely won’t be able to recover it.

3

Please assume that I’m someone who has never before used a Western Digital My Passport External Hard Drive and that I haven’t had any trouble with the external hard drives that I’ve used previously so, when you say, “check the drive in Disk Management,” I don’t know where disk management is.  It may be that I’m a mac user and not an IBM user.  In other words, please walk me through this process in as detailed a manner as you can manage.  Thanks. 

4

I’m not a Mac user this has worked for some on Windows and Mac is listed in supported systems http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk  There are a couple of people that know about macs you may want to wait until one of them posts. This is just a users forum.

Joe