You can be mad at it but what they said is largely true. Not having the data backed up somewhere and expecting everything to be perfectly fine forever is like not having old photos backed up somewhere and expecting everything to be perfectly fine forever.

It’s even more egregious here because if OP can afford a 3TB SSD, they should be able to afford a 3+TB HDD as a backup no problem. The money isn’t an issue for OP, just improper knowledge of how to handle data storage. It isn’t necessarily their fault this happened since the average person isn’t given this info, but at its core, “pay more money” because you need backups is the only true answer