[jandrese]

I have at various times considered a tape backup solution for my home, but always give up when it seems every tape vendor is only interested in business clients. It was a race to stay ahead of hard drives and oftentimes they seemed to be losing. The price points were clearly aimed at business customers, especially on the larger capacity tapes. In the end I do backup to hard drives instead because it's much cheaper and faster.

[stepupmakeup]

Tape absolutely isn't viable for the consumer at all, but definitely worth exploring for the novelty. Even if you manage to get a pretty good deal on a legacy LTO system (other formats don't even come close to the tb/$ of 10+ year old LTO and drives are still fairly cheap), the drives aren't being made any more and aren't getting any cheaper. Backwards compatibilty may be in your favor depending on your choice of tape generation at least, I think there's at least two generations guaranteed. Optical will probably remain king though the pricing is worse than HDDs, there's no shortage of DVD or BD readers, but you might run into issues with quad layer 128 BD as they only hit the market fairly recently.

[bombcar]

The only reasonable solution is to keep migrating and checking the data on various media; but this is expensive and often deemed not worth it.

[justsomehnguy]

Depends on the size of the data.

If your dataset is below 1-2Tb it would cost you less than $200 in a decade to move to a newer HDD every 5 years.

[mrguyorama]

That used to be my method but I decided to "upgrade" to paying backblaze to manage that method for me and just in the nick of time too as my SSD crib-deathed soon after.

[ilyt]

Tape drive and Bareos/Bacula "just works"

Absolutely not worth it tho. Drives are hideously expensive which means they only start making sense where you have at least dozens of tapes.

There is an advantage of tapes not being electrically connected most of the time so lightning strike will not burn your archives, I have pondered making a separate box with a bunch of hard drives that boots once a month and just copies last months of backups on hard drives, powered from solar or something just to separate from the network

[bombcar]

The only way to do tape at home is with used equipment and Linux/BSD. You can do quite a bit with tar and mt (iirc) - even controlling auto loaders.

What’s fun are the hard drive based systems designed to perfectly imitate a tape autoloader so you don’t have to buy new backup software (virtual tape libraries).