Pretty sure that there are colocation places out there that have this, but for copy shops I think it wouldn't work because in general, people have too few data.

Pretty sure that there are colocation places out there that have this, but for copy shops I think it wouldn't work because in general, people have too few data. Most people are perfectly served by the HDDs/SSDs that ship with their computers, and the minority that's not served often buys one or two external HDDs of the newest generation. That's enough for the largest part of the population. Fewest private people have data on the order of dozens of TB where HDDs become so expensive that you are motivated to use the user unfriendly tapes. Why are tapes user unfriendly? For each read/write operation you need to visit the copy shop. This limits the use cases to ones where like backups and archival. But you can't really use them for archival as when you don't archive the drive together with your tapes, who guarantees that a copy shop will exist in 10 years that has drives that can read such old tapes? Yes, tape drives have limited read compatibility to older standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility But maybe there is a niche for it somewhere, who knows.