The scale usually tips towards LTO at around ~100TB or so (give or take 20TB depending on where you are located and how good your negotiation skills are), and t

The scale usually tips towards LTO at around ~100TB or so (give or take 20TB depending on where you are located and how good your negotiation skills are), and that's only if you can afford a tape downtime until you get a new one (in case it breaks), and to refresh the whole library come LTO-10 (because it won't even be able to read your LTO-7 tapes). It almost always makes better sense to back up to hard drives that carry their own connectors and "tape" with them -- I've recently found two disks from 2001 in storage. I needed a $15 IDE-to-USB connector because I don't have IDE connectors anymore. And there were 16 bad 512-byte sectors over one 20GB disk, and no bad sectors over one 15GB disk. Easily readable. I also had a couple of backup tapes from the same era inside the same box I found. The required drive brand is not even listed (it's not LTO), and I'd be surprised if (a) I can find a tape that can read them, and (b) if they still work properly. But I don't need them, because the drives they backed up are still readable .....