You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO

- You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy

- You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home

Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.

AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.

Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s.

You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user.

A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.

The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years.

Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years.

There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs.

There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.

I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.

This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.

No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.

I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media.

When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives.

Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then?

Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.)

I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.

HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol