[queenkjuul]

I do think LTO is a common enough format, and explicitly designed to be backwards-compatible, that it is very likely to be around in 10 years. The companies that rely on it wouldn't invest in it if they didn't think the hardware would be available. 40 years, harder to say, but as someone who owns a fair bit of working tape equipment (cassette, VHS, DV) that is almost all 25+ years old, i wouldn't think it'd be impossible.

That said, i imagine optical drives will be much the same.

[somat]

It is only backwards compatible two generations, occasionally something slips at the LTO trust (or wherever those things are designed) and you get three generations. But if I have a basement full of LTO1 tapes no currently manufactured drive will read them. I would have to buy a used drive and the drives were never really made all that well. Better than the DAT drives one company I worked for used for some of their backups. But still mechanically very complex with many many small delicate plastic parts that wear out quickly. Those DAT drives were super delicate and also suffered from the same generational problems LTO does. We had a bunch of DAT1 tapes somebody wanted data from but had no working drives to do so. All our working drives were newer DAT3 and 4

That was always the hard part to justifying tape backup. the storage is cheap. but the drives are very expensive. And never seemed to last as long as their price would warrant.

[hugo1789]

That also changed somehow... LTO-10 drives are not backward compatible and can only read/write LTO-10 media.

[UltraSane]

That is because LTO-10 had to make an incompatible change to go from 18TB to 30TB