I would edge on the side of caution and save the original drive, then copy the recovered files to a new drive.
My backup protocol at the moment is that I duplicate my working files from one external 2Gb drive onto another, normally after I have completed working on a newly scanned film or a bunch of digital images, I have a simple Robocopy script for this. I do the same for my galleries which are a copy of the final jpegs, saved with minimal compression. I also, periodically, make two copies of the galleries which my sons keep. In the past, I have backed up the working files, the scans, spotted and cropped scans and the final uncompressed jpegs to DVD's. This is no longer viable, file sizes are constantly increasing, so I'm going to periodically backup the files to a third disk and save that somewhere.
Galleries! Well, the basic idea is that there is a gallery per film or digital session, but it isn't properly curated, also lots of the scans are duplicated because, when I was able to scan negatives, I cherry picked rather being systematic. But I also scanned lots of other images, interesting postcards and packaging, adverts, my dad's 5000(? ) slides and negatives and other people's archives. Altogether this amounts to about 70,000 images, 1Tb, or thereabouts.
I've no idea whether this will make any difference in the long run, at least someone might take care of my negatives, at the least an archivist might enjoy making fun of the pictures. Speaking of negatives, I've got some I inherited from the 1920's. And, prints of my relatives from the 19th century. In fact, my sister, who is a researcher, is astonished at our family photographic archive, compared to other families who have very little record.
Coming back to the original thread in a awy, I'm hoping that the digital archive stands the test of time and my grandchildren are able to delve into it.
Worrying though is that some of my early digital (pardon?) video files are no playable using my Windows 11 PC. Obsolete Codecs!