Ask HN: Do you use tapes for personal backup?

A long time ago I used to use tapes. I had an old LTO drive but I stopped buying tapes because I got tired of taking apart the drive to clean the heads and guides. Tapes are only good for so many passes a reason to not buy used tapes by the way and the more passes they have the more oxide that comes off in the drive and the more often it has to be cleaned or backups can be useless. I can only speak for myself but I have grown even lazier in my elder years and do not enjoy cleaning drives any more and I do not like the risk that tapes will be good when I write to them and bad when I need to restore them.

Now I just get one SSD and one NVME every quarter as to not get multiple drives from a single batch and I initially copy my archive directory to the dm-crypt plain volume with 'cp -aR' then subsequent backups use 'rsync -aqhH' also adding --checksum once per quarter and I do this to every one of the SSD's and NVME's. Each set or snapshot in time are locked in their own metal box and one set goes in the truck. If I need a single file there is no need to read far into a tape. That's just my own nutty method, I'm sure others here have much better methods but no more tapes for me.

Is there any economic sense in using tape drives at all for personal use? I've glanced over the prices, and these things are very expensive. It seems to make much more sense to buy a 20TB+ HDD, or few of these.

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.

Best bet is to find a tape library old enough you can pick it up cheap second hand but new enough it can support the latest LTO standard (or close enough with ability to retrofit to future proof). I don't recommend until you're storing at least a few hundred TB of data, if not your first PB.

(have managed tape in both professional and personal use cases)

The biggest problem is in my opinion not the OS support but the hardware. Most Tape drives need scsi ports which PCs rarely have.