I've actually had nothing but great results from Seagate. The only hard drives I've ever had fail on me were more recent WD's and older Maxtor drives. But Seagate drives have never once caused me grief in the 15+ years I've been using them.
Having said that, I agree with having a solid NAS drive. You can even pick up a reasonably decent WD NAS drive for under $200.
One little tool I find really useful for incremental backups is from the same people who make RoboForm -- called GoodSync. You can schedule backups of all drives, external drives, NAS drives, or heck, you can even use it to sync your server's drives to a local drive. And no need to put anything inside some other service's "cloud". And it allows you to store multiple day's copies of files so you can go back X number of days for a specific file edit.
http://www.goodsync.com/
Good luck getting back up to speed.