How would you backup 500GB?

[zanthor]

Even if you put it in something like a nice, padded, water-tight, air-tight pelican case? I hadn't considered this.

But laptop HDDs / Ipods mini-HDDS get constant daily traveling... ?(

Laptop HDDs, Ipod's, etc are all designed for travel and suspended in particularly resilient cases with the idea of being beat to shit... Laptop hard drives top out at 320GB for around $160US... their performance is slower than their desktop counterparts due to the design being shoved into a smaller box, etc... potentially viable to run with the smaller drives but you are talking several of them for each days backup.

We got three servers here which costs about 2500 € (all of them together).
So I got problems argumenting that we shall spent 5000 € for a backup solution =)

I think I'll split the data in several groups and will backup each group twice a week.
So I can use a Quantum 160/320 GB drive which will cost about 1,2K € with 5 tapes.

We got a Raid-Mirror to prevent data loss because of Harddisk Crash and we even got
an external backup harddisk. Only reason why I want another backup solution is if
someone steals the PC or we got a fire in here.

This is well outside your original spec of:

I'd like to backup 500 GB daily and the backup needs to be carried out of the company (in case of fire)
so I'm looking for a backup solution which can backup 500 GB and ain't that heavy / big.

It sounds like you have your need, one thing I'd caution you of is to ensure you analyze the cost of lost data since the last offsite backup before you commit to your client or your supervisor a proposal that is going to cost them thousands. I know we are talking different scales here... The company I work for does backups nightly of our database servers with 4 hour incremental translog dumps because losing more than half a days work would cost us that much...

If the budget is the issue, write up what it would cost to do it "right", and write up what it would cost to do it within their budget. Document the risks of doing it on a budget and let the customer or supervisor make the call... that way if it does blow up down the road, it's not on your shoulders.

As an aside, when I was working in the retail world I had a customer who called me up with a dead scsi drive on his server, the server was 7 years old and wasn't built with a RAID... he said no biggie as he had a backup from the previous night. Once I arrived on site, I was stunned as not only did he have last nights backup, but he had a well labeled mobile box of tapes that he said he took home each night, he had 14 tapes that he rotated through religiously... Two 7 day cycles of one full backup and 6 incremental backups...

So I toss the drive in the system, install the base OS and start the restore... once the restore finishes I notice something odd... all the file dates are 7 years old... I check the backups and I see snapshots for 3 weeks on each full backup set, but they are all 7 years old... I dump the backup config from the backup, and check...

Sure enough the technician that set them up 7 years ago (thank god this wasn't me) had set the backup job to append to the tapes instead of overwrite... and had turned off error reporting. So for 7 years, my customer had rotated tapes in and out of the system only to have the system throw a media full error and end the job. Since the tech had never trained the end user to check the logs, we had a worthless backup...

Three days later OnTrack Data Recovery had a full dump of his drive for us, only cost the customer $2,500 for that...