The choice between magnetic tapes and disks depends mainly on the total amount of archived data.

Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.

Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.

Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.

I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.

Look, I get it, you're a power user with very special needs. But the rest of the home user world is on a different page. It's funny if you think home users in general have these kinds of wants or needs just because you're a user, at home.

The data volumes, the cost even before we look at the TCO, the performance characteristics, the time/expertise requirements, the need (hassle) for proper storage and retrieval really kill the attraction of tape for home use.

For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination.

I should have been more precise - by “home user” I meant people who run DataCenter equipment at home; datahoarders and homelabs.

What I have said is that for this kind of home users external HDDs are obviously the right solution as long as the total amount of stored data is not much more than 100 TB.

For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability.

Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations.

Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.

> For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination.

Cloud is not a backup. Cloud is someone else's storage.

One thing that worries me about home tape use is dust and cat hair.

I've had a DDS4 tape way back, which ended up dying, and that could well be the cause. My house is not going to be as clean as a server room.

I've seen tape drives taken apart and there seems to be a worrying lack of concern with any kind of air filtration on the ones I've seen at least. And I don't think it should be all that hard to deal with it. Maybe something like sucking air in through a replaceable filter and exhausting it out of the tape door.

Wouldn't a home air filter sitting adjacent to the tape drive remove almost all of that problem?

Maybe, but it seems to me that the one dust sensitive and very expensive piece of hardware would be not be designed to at least try to minimize the problem.