Recommend me a reliable External Hard drive!

[no-one]

You'd be surprised what professional companies can get back.

Actually not I know they can do a lot, but honestly, I wasn't willing to pay that much money; especially since you don't have a 100% guarantee that they can restore anything...

concerning the optical media... I've experienced a lot of problems, especially with DVDs; they seem to be quite "unsteady" to me... I have a few hundred DVDs lying around here (backups files from me and my friends), and some (probably 10 or 15) aren't working any more; no real scratches, no heat or anything else applied to... and I know a lot of people who have the same problems;
btw I can remember having my first CD writer and the old CDRs caused almost the same trouble back then...

what I'm trying to say: I never had a defect harddrive (as such), so I would always prefer harddrives for backups such as this