I also run my own tape setup for personal backups. On where to source etc - I’d agree with others that eBay is a good option for both drives and media (but as a

I also run my own tape setup for personal backups. On where to source etc - I’d agree with others that eBay is a good option for both drives and media (but as always check what exactly you’re buying and make sure you’re comfortable with the seller). You’ll almost certainly need a SCSI or FC interface too so don’t forget that. I’d recommend going with external standalone drives rather than either internal or sled mounted for this type of setup unless you’ve got a good reason to do otherwise as that means you only need to power the drive when you’re using it which can cut down on wear etc. I’ve only ever read bad things about mixing generations despite the fact that the drives are capable of this (eg LTO5 tape in LTO6/7 drives) though I’ve not done this personally - but I wouldn’t recommend doing so based on this. Don’t be tempted to buy really old generations as if you ever need to restore in a disaster where you only have the tapes, you then have the nightmare of sourcing a new old drive too which by that point might be a lot harder. You’ll want to think carefully about software setup. You’re probably going to wind up using some form of custom scripts unless you can put in the time to set up bacula properly and are sure it works for you (bare metal restore can be a tricky aspect of any system to verify it works properly). If you script your own then make sure you also understand the drawbacks of tar. tar as a tool is highly compatible which is good but is poor at recording incremental backups (there are some custom extensions which gnu tar has but this reduces compatibility) if you want to go with a more complex schedule than full backup every time. Tar also makes it difficult to seek to just the part of the archive that you need to get a single file. Again there are gnu extensions for this but this isn’t the best solution. Finally, tar then gzip means if your gzip stream gets corrupted then you might lose quite a bit of the tar archive so it’s not very resilient. You could rely on the drive compression but you might also consider other solutions, especially ones which also include checksumming. Consider either scripting around these or better what other tools could take its place (eg I have used dar in some of my setup as it handles this better but then you need to think about keeping a working binary around which can unpack your archives - I put a static compiled binary in my archive sets just in case). Finally if you go down the tape route then consider strongly spooling your stream which will be written out to tape onto disk first, to give yourself maximum chance of getting the more consistent throughput onto tape which has benefits in terms of tape reliability (and may indeed wind up being quicker overall). That also allows you to easily write multiple copies of the same tape if you intend to send one or more offsite and keep one locally. Where this setup works well for me is that when you start wanting many copies of your backups (offsite, multiple point in time full backups etc) then the cost effectiveness becomes a lot better than the equivalent with disk. I also trust tape to survive longer term on a shelf than disk.