This isn’t going to help you, but a lot of people seem to make this mistake that having things on one external drive equals ‘backing up’. If you were keeping the files on the laptop too, that would have been a backup. If the people taking the laptop werre going to erase your original data, then your copy wasn’t a backup, it was just that your data was somewhere else. Backup = 2 copies. You were left with only one copy.
I’m not saying this to say ‘I told you so’, but maybe other people might think about this and avoid the same problems…
