I have dozens of terabytes of data in a media library I want to safe keep. My hard drives are nice but I was looking for something longer lasting, that didn't occupy too much space and where I could keep the files and copy them to a new drive if the HDD I keep in my desk were to fail.
Someone here pointed towards magnetic tape, at first I thought it felt archaic but then I saw some tape drives that could hold up to 45TB compressed or 18TB lossless for the LTO-9 with some decent write and read speeds. Each at a somewhat reasonable price. Plus the fact they apparently can last for quite a while.
But then I looked into the actual drives to read or write the tapes and I almost fell off my chair at the prices. Going for several thousand dollars at best, some even more than 10k
I just did some preliminary search so I could be missing something but it seems these are for enterprise use, and my use would be purely personal. To use with a normal windows PC.
Are there any cheaper options to get into magnetic tape? Thus far I would only need 1 or 2 tape drives to hold my data, but that of course can change.
Or should I give up and try to use something like M-disks or some other optical disk archival tech and simply keep the data in a (possibly very tall) disc stack?