Recommended external hard drive brand?

I know there might not be a "right answer" for this but I was looking for some opinions.

I currently have a Seagate, and between Vinny's comments on I think it was Die Another Friday and hearing some other Seagate horror stories, I'm looking into getting another backup in case something goes wrong. It's also a couple of years old, so I figure it can't hurt anyway.

Is there a brand that is generally the most trusted? It seems like most of the 2TB external drives are about the same price, so that's not a concern.

This is kind of a hard question

If your goal is to back things up, an external hard drive is actually a bad decision. Some brands are more durable than others,. but you are still relying on a single point of failure that you might even lose (I know I have an old seagate somewhere in my apartment). An external drive, at least in my opinion, is for transferring large amounts of data (and you are better off using your lan these days) and accessing low value content with a comparatively low frequency. Like videos you might only really watch at 2 am.

For backup purposes I think there are two viable options these days

The first is to get a NAS. A two bay QNAP or Synology (I think they are about equal in quality and capability these days) tends to not be too expensive (given the context) and it lets you set up redundancy in case one drive fails. And, with QNAP at least (presumably also Synology), I have handy dandy wizards to increase my storage when I decide I need larger drives. I personally like QNAP a lot as my NAS also doubles as a plex server and a VPN for when I REALLY need to check my bank accounts on travel. And in case of the town burning down I can either grab the NAS or just pull both drives (theoretically just one) and leave. And with simple software I can sync stuff between my desktop, laptop, phone, and NAS. Which is handled by tools like dropbox, but when you are syncing stuff you probably shouldn't put on a phone anyway (password database) it is nice to have control. And, should I enable it, I can access a web interface from anywhere in the world to check on the status or grab a file. And it lets me do the second option in an automated fashion

But... a NAS is probably a stupid purchase in this day and age. Even if you are storing a crapton of pictures you are probably better off just looking at cloud storage providers (I use Amazon). Encrypt things locally and then just set up a script/utility (many open source options) to periodically back them up to the cloud. If you do a bit of research you can even take advantage of the different access patterns to save cash. In this case you are looking at a few bucks a month. So in the long run you are paying more than you would for a NAS but... you are paying a lot for a NAS.

My personal setup is a two bay QNAP that does monthly encrypted backups of some of my files to Amazon. Stuff like pictures I don't really need the original super high res so I don't bother to cloud storage the originals. But documents I definitely do. But if I were to make a suggestion it would probably be to just do some research on the price of storage with the various providers and pick two (you could probably just do one). Avoids the single point of failure and is a LOT cheaper

That being said, I love my NAS and even run a few services (like a personal gitlab) on there because "why not?".

What you are looking for is the sort of statistics revealed in BackBlaze's Annualized Hard Drive Failure Rate chart. The latest one is HERE for teh year 2018. Warning: you really have to read the whole article to understand what they are talking about because honestly the difference are measure in fractions of a percent.

What that means if you do not want to read --- choose ANY name brand. (boom! done!) As a consumer will not see any difference in date duriablity that is much different beyond a hundred of a percent between any drive.