Recommendations for a Backup Drive for a Mac Laptop?

Yes, but which one depends on your requirements.

FWIW, as a Time Machine backup disk I'm using a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II with a 2x 3 TB mirror. This model doesn't exist anymore and the current equivalent must be the MyBook Thunderbolt Duo. These are large capacity drives, so it might be overkill but mine backs up another external drive in addition to my Mac internal drive.

If it needs to be portable, I like the MyPassport Studio firewire drives (you may need an adapter thunderbolt->firewire). There are USB3 models as well (my MBP is an old model with no USB3 or Thunderbolt). You may want to buy 2 of them and rotate your backups, keeping one offsite at any time. You might even want to buy a third one and clone your internal disk with SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner to have a bootable alternative drive in case of your internal drive is going AWOL. Just to say...

Some people have had woes with WD drives at some point in the past, so YMMV. I never had a single problem yet (fingers crossed).

Note that I think WD is currently having problems with Mavericks, so if this is what you're currently running, you may want to wait a bit until it settles, or look at another brand.

You do not say which Mac Laptop you have

Does it have a Thunderbolt socket, otherwise you are doomed to slow backup speeds. In which case get a Time Capsule and run Time machine via your network router. If you leave the laptop connected to your lan via an ethernet cable you should be able to get a reliable backup service.

If you do have a Thunderbolt socket then get a Thunderbolt cable, and a Thunderbolt connected drive. Then use Superduper to back up the main drive to the Thunderbolt drive.  The advantage of this process is that one can boot up the machine from the back up drive to get back on the air to determine what has gone wrong with your main drive and how to fix the problem.

To be properly secure you should run Time Machine and a full image backup, even if a USB connected drive takes for ever to back up the drive.

I am using Time Machine and a Seagate Backup plus 2,5'' USB 3.0. This is a very small cheap hard disk that is connected to my Mac Book all the time, when I am at home. IMHO USB is not an issue with Time Machine.

Every month, I make a complete backup of all user files on two separate disks, one disk is kept at home and the other at the office.

I use a Time Capsule and a G-Tech Mini (via Firewire) for backup of all data (i.e. including music).  

If you are interested in a mobile Thunderbolt drive, Freecom has one which caught my attention (however, no experience with that).

HTH

Jude