I’ve been using feralhosting for several years now, and it’s great. You can setup a bunch of stuff on your slice, like the *arr suite and the bandwidth is way more than enough for my usage. The support is also fairly helpful granted you’ve read the documentation first, which can be a bit lacking on some of the issues I’ve had to troubleshoot. But most of the time it’s because I’m an idiot who reads diagonally. So yeah, highly recommend feralhosting.

It sounds like your partition table is corrupted. Recreating it (with parted or fdisk) shouldn’t affect the data. Also, I believe that if it shows up as a block device, you should be able to copy it with dd. dd can write to another block device or to a file (like an iso).

Even though Arch is very well documented, it’s not really accessible to newcomers. The documentation assumes that you know the basics, so if you don’t, you’re screwed. Mint, Pop! and Debian, to some extent, are much more accessible.