LTO-5 worked great for my use case and I find new/old-stock LTO5 tapes for about $5/TB on ebay. I verify every tape after writing, and I include about 25% to 30

LTO-5 worked great for my use case and I find new/old-stock LTO5 tapes for about $5/TB on ebay. I verify every tape after writing, and I include about 25% to 30% parity data on each tape to combat bit rot. I don't really need to write more than 1TB at a time of data, and the rest of the room on the tape is parity data (PAR files). The drive was super cheap, $150 used. I don't expect it to last forever, I plan to buy another tape drive as a backup and eventually upgrade to an LTO-6 drive. After making 2 copies of all my important data, about 30TB on LTO-5 tape, I don't have that much to back up, maybe 2TB a month, but it's easy to justify buying a few more tapes every now and then. Buying 2 hard drives for redundancy is just not anywhere near as cheap as buying 2 LTO tapes for the same amount of data, even for people with less than 100TB of data.