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?

Looks like I'm a bit out of date, but older generations of LTO drives were able to read tapes from up to two generations ago, and write tapes from one generation back. Looks like this isn't the case since LTO-8. It looks for 8 and 9 theycan read and write to tapes back one generation. 10 breaks the pattern and can only read LTO-10 tapes.

https://www.lto.org/lto-generation-compatibility/

Perhaps for some use-cases, the value of the data degrades at a rate proportional to its persistence layer, and doing a re-migration is not useful.