I have around 65TB backed up on LTO5 tapes. Found them very reliable when needed for a restore and great for an off-site backup.

However I would say it is overkill for anything under 20TB.

Backblaze r2 is $6/tb/mo first 10gb are free

Definitely do not do tapes.

I'd also recommend Backblaze. Their S3 compatible storage is pretty affordable. I backup to a Kopia repo and then replicate to Backblaze nightly.

Tapes require so much more work to keep up to date and mght not even be cheaper over time.

The good ones... Are not cheap (if someone knows a cheap option though, I'd be happy to add it to my own repertoire!)

For me, I backup with:

• A second NAS
• a clone to a NAS at two other homes (family), which also sync to mine
• Encrypted backups to generic cloud storage

Edited to add:

You dont need to backup everything.

What is being backed up by me at all the locations above:

• Content I can't replace (home photos, movies, etc)
• Configs for services
• Personal documents and other such data.
• etc

Aside from the home movies, its not a huge amount of data. Lots of VHS conversions of graduations, Christmases, etc of long past.

Locally I back up more to the second NAS including:

• Content I can replace but this is faster
• Full backups of VMs
• LXC snapshots
• etc

So while I have a huge amount of storage at home, what's needed elsewhere is not anywhere near as much.

Great question! If it's only a few GB I wouldn't bother with tape. There are other options like

• Google Photos - I've been using it for 10+ years without filling up the free 10 or 15 GB, whatever it is.
• Burning a bunch of DVDs, repeat every 5 years.
• Get a couple cheap hard drives then replace 1 of them every 3-5 years so one is always fairly new.

a few GB of photos

get an m-disc burner and make multiple full backups to distribute around your family

Hetzner Storage box is $20/month for 10tb.

Forget the tapes. This is hard to say but just pay for online storage. It's $9.99 a month for 2TB from Google and Apple. Your data will be safe and accessable by family if something happens to you. You could also get a cheap NAS like device like this https://a.co/d/dgsnQbr and maybe every couple of months you create a offline backup onto another device.

Why do tape drives seen to be best? What's your use case? They're still used in enterprise environments because they're insanely dense compared to hard disks, and it's real easy to load a truck with a few petabytes to ship elsewhere. Is that what you need? Density? Seems like not for just a few gigs.

If you want backups you need to ship your media, tapes or otherwise, off-site.

Pop your files into a cloud service and call it done. If you're looking for long term archives and don't want to use other people's computers, burn some DVDs and store them at someone else's house.

My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.

Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.

I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.

Tape is unfortunately uneconomical for regular people due to the drives costing so much, unless you get a used, older generation one.

How many GB's do you mean? Maybe try some optical discs, BD-R at 25GB maybe.

Otherwise just rent some online storage. Hetzner Storage Box is cheap and Storage Share is only slightly less cheap, and has lots of sharing features (it's really NextCloud).

DVDs are the same idea but easier

I wouldn’t do tape. If you don’t want a cloud option, why not use use a thumb drive?

If you are willing to do tape, you can store a thumb drive into same way.

Tapes can have long term issues in storage, as the tape reel winds will eventually start to bleed over magnetic signals from one wind to the next.

In analog world, they call it tape hiss. In digital world, with good error correction, it can last a long time, but is still ultimately prone to data corruption, eventually..

I recommend a video surveillance rated multi terabyte hard drive, they're designed to run 24/7. I have two 4TB Seagate Skyhawks.

Tape drives will be expensive and likely beyond overkill for this. I'd recommend you grab a blue ray DVD writer and use that instead. The discs are generally shelf stable for 25 years and hold about 50-128GB depending on the disc. Duplicates are cheap, storage is relatively easy, and it doesn't require constant upkeep/power like a hard drive would. Downsides? They just stopped making the discs, so they'll grow in cost over time. That's about it that I can think of.