I'm a STRONG believer in tapes!
Even LTO 5 gives you a very cheap 1.5TB of clean, pretty much bulletproof storage.. You can pick a drive (with a SAS HBA card) for less than $200, there is zero driver issue (SCSI, baby); the linux tape changer code is stable since 1997 (with a port to VMS!).
Tape FTW :-)
LTO tapes have really changed my life, or at least my mental health. Easy and robust backup has been elusive. DVD-R was just not doing it for me. Hard drives are too expensive and lacked robustness. My wife is a pro photographer so the never-ending data dumps had filled up all our hard drives, and spending hundreds of dollars more on another 2-disk mirror RAID, and then another, and another was just stupid. Most of the data will only need to be accessed rarely, but we still want to keep it. I lost sleep over the mountains of data we were hoarding on hard drives. I've had too many hard drives just die, including RAIDs being corrupted. LTO tape changed all of that. It's relatively cheap, and pretty easy and fast compared to all the other solutions. It's no wonder it's still being used in data centers. I love all the data center hand-me-downs that flood eBay.
And I do love hearing the tapes whir, it makes me smile.
Then I scored another 3 used LTO5 tape drives on eBay for about $100, they all worked. I mainly use 1 tape drive. I have it running on an Intel i5 system with an 8-drive RAID10 array (cheap used drives, with a $50 9260-8i hardware RAID card), which acts as my "offsite" backup out in my detached garage - it's off most of the time (cold storage?) unless I'm running a backup. I can loose up to 2 drives without losing any data, and it's been running really well for years. I have 3 of these RAID setups in 3 different systems, they work great with the cheapest used drives from Amazon. I'm not looking for high performance, I just need redundancy. I've had to replace maybe 3 drives across all 3 systems due to failure over the last 7 years.
On Windows the tape drive with LTFS was not working well, I think due to Windows Defender trying to test the files as it was writing them, causing a lot of "shoeshining" of the tape, but I think Windows Defender can be disabled. But I bought tape backup software from https://www.iperiusbackup.com - it just works and makes backups simple to set up and run. I always verify the backup. If something is really important I'll back up to at least 2 tapes. Some really important stuff I will generate parity files (win WinPar) and put those on tape too. Non-encrypted the drive runs at the full 140MB/s, but with encryption it runs at about 60MB/s, because I guess the tape drive is doing the encryption.
I love it, it has changed my data-hoarding life. At $3.50/TB and 140MB/s and 1.5TB per tape, it can't be beat by DVD-R or hard drives for backup. Used LTO5 is really in a sweet spot right now on eBay, but LTO6 is looking good too recently (2.5TB/tape). LTO6 drives can read LTO5 tapes, so there's a pretty easy upgrade path. I also love that there is a physical write-protect switch on the tapes, which hard drives don't have. If you plug in a hard drive to an infected system, that hard drive could easily be compromised if you don't know your system is infected.
