About twenty years ago, I bought a new Qik 40 tape drive from the bargain bin at a big box office supply store. I felt I had an analogous use case...backing up all my personal and business and hobby data in case I needed it one day. The best most productive use I ever got out of it was moving a bunch of software and data from the office to my home computer. In those days the practical easy alternative was primarily 3.5" floppy disks, so a tape that could hold 60mb was pretty damn attractive. The full picture is that I also copied all my personal data onto tape twice, just in case. A year or two later, I bought a Zip drive so I could exchange data with clients. I copied "just in case" personal data onto Zip disks because it was more convenient than the tape. A couple of years later, I got a laptop with a CDRW and it filled a similar role. Then a desktop with a DVDRW.

About a year ago, I was going through some boxes at my parents house. There was a box of 5.25 DS disks holding backups of my important data. The only copy. Like all the Qic 40 tapes and Zip disks and most of the CD's and DVD's, they wound up in the trash.

For me, backing up personal stuff onto some technology has been mostly an exercise in spending time and money deleting it. I guess the practical heuristic is that if I can live with it being offline, I will live if I delete it. And the moral of the story is that deleting it sooner rather than later is cheaper.

Tape is a great technology when it makes money. It is a lousy consumer technology. Ebay shows me one "qic 40 drive." It's only twenty years later.