TOSHIBA External Hard Drive Files Lost After Plugging in to Different Device

Hi, all! I have been using a TOSHIBA external hard drive with my (personal) 2020 MacBook Air just fine for the past few months. A machine in my PhD lab had a software update, and since the files were huge, I downloaded them onto my hard drive to transfer over. (We purposely don't connect that computer to the internet because we don't want any accidental automatic updates, which could corrupt our research data.) Upon plugging in to the lab machine's computer, the hard drive was being recognized but could not be opened, so I played around with a few Disk Management features, including creating a new volume — still no luck. I gave up for the day, but when I went to plug the drive back into my personal laptop, everything was empty — is there a way to recover my files? Thank you so much in advance!