[jug]

I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much uncertainty and variety depending on brand.

[brudgers]

There's nothing better for consumers because backing up is not a consumer behavior. Backing up is a business behavior and because it is a business behavior people pay other people to do it.

Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.

[UltraSane]

You can buy used older gen LTO drives for not too much money.

[brudgers]

Sure, but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years? Mechanical issues, driver issues, etc.

And already you have to be really committed to backing up to go down that rabbit hole. LTO is lots of different standards that evolved over many years.

Just for clarity, I am not suggesting that the holographic tape in TFA is better.

[UltraSane]

"but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years?"

Exactly as easy as it is now? LTO drives are used in the millions globally to back up many exabytes of data. LTO is designed with backwards compatibility. a drive on gen n can read tapes from gen n-1 and n-2 and write to tapes from gen-1.

[brudgers]

Exactly as easy as it is now?

One could hope. But hope is not a plan and generally complex electronics become increasingly harder to run with obsolescence. And LTO has planned obsolesence (probably because the expectation is that most companies will run drives into the ground with the expectation of upgrading to larger capacities on the roadmap).

Also LTO drives put out noise appropriate for a data center, not bedroom. While this is probably ok if you are into home servers, that’s not for casual use.

Or to put it another way, LTO is a how-hard-could-it-be solution which is fine if you need a new hobby or are making money but not a greenfield solution for most people.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been attracted by the idea of being the kind of person who can say they use LTO at home for some years. But every time I look at it, I don’t want LTO as a hobby any more than I want a eight Pentium Pro Proliant Server as a hobby.