The drives are relatively cheap. I picked up an LTO-5 drive for about $150. I don't care that it's used. At that price I can buy 3 of them so that I have spares. And the next gen tape drive will always read the previous gen tapes. So it's an easy upgrade path. I'll go to LTO-6 when those drives come down a little in price on the used market. Then LTO-7 if I'm even alive lone enough to need that much storage. Realistically, I have about 30-40 years left in me and after that I don't really care what happens to my backups. They're encrypted, with parity files, so it's not unreasonable to think that these backups will last me the rest of my life.