Maybe you are already doing this, but some repetitive items like individual cells could be models themselves, and you could assemble many of them in the chor to make the whole set, then you could turn their "Active" property ON when they are needed on camera and OFF when they are not visible to possibly save on render time.
You can also turn their realtime visibility ON and OFF in the chor to speed up your general working. Whether this is useful depends on how much you need to be working in the whole set.
Sorry you lost your previous work! That new external drive is for backups, I hope?