Keep in mind that tapes usually advertise double their capacity, assuming that your data is very compressible. Considering that, it's less likely that tapes ar

Keep in mind that tapes usually advertise double their capacity, assuming that your data is very compressible. Considering that, it's less likely that tapes are cost effective. Also, tapes, and especially the drives, don't last as long as you'd expect. If you're regularly backing up so you can restore a backup after a failure, it'll work fine until the drive errors out on one of the backups, immediately alerting you that something's wrong. If you're archiving data, you may find that when you try to read it, even just a decade from now, that you have to replace belts on the tape drive or use a data recovery tool on the tape, because something failed while it was in storage.