Probably due to a power outage, I suddenly lost access to a connected USB HDD yesterday. According to parted, I get the message “unknown partition table,” and gdisk says the GPT is corrupted. Using testdisk, I was able to copy the files to another drive and restore the partition table and mount the HDD.

Is it possible that the partition table was damaged by the power outage, or does this point to a different problem? Can I safely store data on such an HDD again, or should I replace it?