As Rick said, ALL drives can fail. Over the years I have dealt with MANY brands, and at this point have no preference at all.

As for backup software, rather than just copy the files, if you want something less full blown than a full backup system, have a look at rsync, and it's GUI frontend Grsync http://www.opbyte.it/grsync/ . Works across many platforms and minimises the time needed by synchronising instead of just copying, and just sending the differences between files.