With the slight downside that you won't be able to acquire a drive for less than $800.

LTO's combination of cheap media and expensive drives is great for people with rooms full of tapes, but it makes it pretty unattractive for everything else.

Depends on your requirements. Something lowest common denominator like LTO2 is still useful, cheap, reliable and the drives are also cheap and reliable.

You can always feed your LTO2 tape into a LTOx drive and get the data back.

Obviously you have to be fairly patient, but for my use case (once a week on my third tier of backup) it's good and gives peace of mind that I can put in a fireproof safe.

Primary backups are still on the cloud though - S3 Glacier is a good option.

By LTOx, you mean at most LTO4 right? I thought LTO drives could read at most 2 generations prior. Also, you need to get to LTO5 to get useful capacity (~1.5GB/tape), LTO2 is limited to 200GB + whatever you can get with compression.

I've been keeping an eye on tapes for literally a decade or more, but for my personal backups hard drives get enough bigger every year that I'm comfortable with (for now) a pair of 8TB usb drives with secondary local backups which I swap between plugged in at home and powered down in my locked desk drawer at work every Monday. I've got a while to go yet before I'm worried about capacity there, and 12TB drives are already available, and will easily be in the right budget soft spot for me when I need them.

And how much is the tape drive? For _most_ people (not data centers) that prohibitively expensive. A 2 TB harddisk is $48 from newegg (and I'm sure you can find cheaper).

Lots of people here focusing on the cost of the drive without factoring in:

- For home use, it is likely a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime purchase (try saying that about any other kind of media)

- You don't have to buy a brand new drive of the latest generation at sticker price; used last gen(s) gear from the enterprise works just as well.

- Perhaps most importantly, what's your data worth? I don't know about you guys, but I've got photos and documents that are irreplaceable.

Tapes beat all other storage media on $/GB, reliability over time, and arguably durability, all of which are the most important factors for offline backup.

$500 comes out in the wash over a decade or two. That's the kind of time scales we're talking about. Yes, it's not cheap and easy consumer electronics you can buy off the shelf at Walmart, but it's not unreasonable either.

Can you recommend specific tape drives and/or generations? I have never considered it but you make a good point. Maybe this is the time create a backup of my irreplaceable Google photos collection.

Really, it comes down to your budget. LTO drives don't do anything interestingly different across manufacturers, and I've seen no evidence of significant reliability differences either. So, just buy the biggest generation that makes sense for your data storage needs.

Two important things to note:

1. LTO5 and onwards have a feature called LTFS, which allows you to address the tape as an ordinary file system. Before that, you were limited to purpose-built tape tools.

2. Generally, tapes can be read in drives 2 generations newer, and written in drives 1 generation newer. This rule was broken with LTO8, due to new tape composition. Starting here, it's 1 generation newer read/write.

For "purpose built tape tools", tar and dd are fine. tar is a bit easier to restore. If you are running Windows, well, don't run Windows as Microsoft have removed all the built-in tape stuff they used to supply with Windows Server and all the alternatives either cost money or are hideously complicated.

Debian + old HPE server + tape drive + tar. Job done.

That's hilarious. I did buy a tape drive. Heck, I bought a tape library. Guess what? It's useless today because my data consumption has scaled with technology and that old DAT based solution just can't cut it. Any tape drive bought today will be garbage in N years. Just a simple fact.

With all due respect, your data usage needs are yours and can't extrapolate to everyone else's. A few 320GB DAT cartridges may be enough to back up the essentials.

How does one choose a tape drive? I see wild variation on tape drives and no idea on why that is.

If the devices are not too large or ridiculously expensive, than it definitely makes sense to use tape as backup. Hard disks are convenient but fail at inopportune times.

And the drives are expensive.... Especially if you want something that handles fairly modern tapes for actual useful capacity.

And how much for the tape machine?

The person above was talking about the cost of HDDs, they didn't include the cost of a machine or NAS to run them in so why should I?

Seems like a double standard wherein people are going to pretend housing multiple HDDs costs $0 (unrealistic) but won't even evaluate spending money on a tape drive.

You what doesn't get cryptolockered? Yesterday's tape sitting on the shelf.

Because we're talking about most people, and most people already have a machine into which they can plug a HDD. Often that's the very machine with the documents they want to backup.

I think "plugs into SATA or USB" is a reasonable standard for a backup storage medium.

Whereas I think that isn't a backup at all, because it is plugged into the same machine (i.e. online backup) and therefore going to get crypto-lockered.

A USB drive hooked up via ESATA or USB is directly comparable to an LTO tape.

So is a tape left in the drive.

If you can move a tape to a shelf, you can unplug a USB cable.

And to your question about having a separate machine, a Pi will be fine.

Neither SATA nor USB implies permanence.

Most people do not have a $1000 LTO tape drive.

You can pick up a second hand HPE deskside server with a tape drive included for $200-$300. Might only be LTO2 but that's still 400Gb of rock solid storage for no money.

If you cannot fit the backup on a single tape then you increased the headache and number of ways this can fail. I cannot phantom how you can see this as superior to hard-drive (which will probably end up cheaper too).