I debated doing this recently but ultimately spent a lot of money on an LTO-6 tape drive instead, just due to the cost efficiency over time for larger amounts of data. I justified it to myself as I needed to either expand my NAS or clear stuff off it, and the drive was the same price as buying two new HDDs to expand the NAS thanks to the obscene price inflation at the moment. As I’d likely need to further expand my NAS next year (I’m shooting a lot of photo and video) I think this works out a much more cost effective way of storing this data long term when I likely don’t need to access it much.

As a person instead of a company, can't you just buy a stack of hard drives instead of a stack of tapes?

Even with the inflated prices nowadays 3tb 3.5" sata drives are cheaper than 2.5tb LTO-6 tapes.

Personally I don't trust optical. I had some DVD-RW drives and many of them became unreadable after a very short time.

(I don't know what the absolute vs practicate reliability factors are for any of these)

EDIT: Hmmm... https://www.howtogeek.com/the-thousand-year-disc-that-failed...

I am also considering an LTO solution of some kind, but I also found out that LTO drives seemingly need some TLC and maintenance if you don’t want your tapes to jam up. I feel like at least with optical media, it’s nearly impossible to screw it up.

I really wish a multi-terabyte optical media solution took off, because that would be the path I’d ultimately take, instead of going with expensive LTO devices and media.

I've been thinking about different techniques for making my NAS backup-able to cold storage and... the thing that has given me pause with tape is how closed-down the ecosystem for the LTO drives themselves seems to be. What's your strategy for knowing you'll be able to access your tapes to transfer them forward to the next generation in 10-15 years when the tapes start reaching the end of their dependable life?