2tb External Hard Disk to backup, photos, files, music

First off, make sure you are disconnecting it correctly. Via the Eject option, don't just pull the cable out.

Secondly, there are only 3 Hard drive manufacturers left. Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba I believe. So if you want a hdd you'll have to buy a drive from, or made, by one of those. They may be branded as something else, but it'll be one of those 3.

You could go down the ssd route, these are getting cheaper.

Or have you considered just buying a USB memory pen, or sd card? If its only to backup stuff and store it away, might be an option too. I have a couple of big capacity sd cards which are ideal for storing photos and throwing them in a drawer.

Be careful about cheaper USB storage devices. You can get a lot of bogus drives on the amazing shopping site. Steve Gibson recently created a utility to test and verify drives are the size what they claimed to be:

Ultimately I think if it's something REALLY important, then you'll probably be best having 2 backups. Only having 1 copy of anything is risky imho

Was that from Amazon themselves, or 3rd party sellers on Amazon?

I wouldn't expect Amazon themselves to be supplying fake drives. I would understand it from 3rd party though.

Most of the ones on Steve's list were unavailable, but 4 are still available and are shipped by Amazon, though sold by 3rd party:

They all have 3.5-3.9 reviews, but 20%+ of one star reviews are mostly saying they don't store much or just don't work.

I stand corrected, I had thought connecting to power included a process of refreshing the charge on cells, but it doesn't, so you would have to copy the data off and back on again every 10 years or sooner, as the 10 years is just an estimate from accelerated aging tests..

My household has seen 3 hard drive failures. Their data retention isn't permanenet either.

Neither hard drives nor flash memory are suitable for archival storage of data.