Tapes are cheap, tape drives are expensive. Using tape for backups only starts making economic sense when you have enough data to fill dozens or hundreds of tapes. For smaller data sets, hard drives are cheaper.

Used LTO5+ drives are incredibly cheap, you can get a whole tape library with two drives and many tape slots for under 1k.

Tapes are also way more reliable than hard drives.

HDDs are a pragmatic choice for “backup” or offline storage. You’ll still need to power them up, just for testing, and also so the “grease” liquefies and they don’t stick.

Up through 2019 or so, I was relying on BD-XL discs, sized at 100GB each. The drives that created them could also write out M-DISC archival media, which was fearsomely expensive as a home user, but could make sense to a small business.

100GB, spread over one or more discs, was plenty of capacity to save the critical data, if I were judiciously excluding disposable stuff, such as ripped CD audio.

If you don’t have a massive amount of data to backup, used LTO5/6 drives are quite cheap, software and drivers is another issue however with a lot of enterprise kit.

The problem ofc is that with a tape you need to also have a backup tape drive on hand.

Overall if you get a good deal you can have a reliable backup setup for less than $1000 with 2 drives and a bunch of tape.

But this is only good if you have single digit of TBs or low double digit of TBs to backup since it’s slow and with a single tape drive you’ll have to swap tapes manually.

LTO5 is 1.5TB and LTO6 is 2.5TB (more with compression) it should be enough for most people.

> But this is only good if you have single digit of TBs or low double digit of TBs

That's not so enticing when I could get 3 16TB hard drives for half the price, with a full copy on each drive plus some par3 files in case of bad sectors.

You could, it’s really a question of what your needs are and what your backup strategy is.

Most people don’t have that much data to back up, I don’t backup movies and shows I download because I can always rebuild the library from scratch I only backup stuff I create, so personal photos, videos etc.

I’m not using a tape backup either, cloud backup is enough for me its cheap as long as you focus your backups to what matters the most.

I have used LTO5 drives under FreeBSD and Linux. Under Linux I used both LTFS and tar. There was zero issues with software.

Older drives are a bit better but still ymmv. Had quite a few issues with Ethernet based drives on Linux in the past.