I need some help.
Every now and then I look into moving my backups off of a HDDs. Carrying a large box of HDDs, and then carefully migrating them to fresher drives as they age has been a chore.
Tape makes perfect sense, as the optical media stalled at max 100GB capacity, and SSD is too expensive still.
And, we finally have Thunderbolt external drives:
https://ltoworld.com/products/owc-archive-pro-lto-8-thunderbolt-tape-storage-archiving-solution-0tb-no-software-copy?srsltid=AfmBOopwwRkLc2f07XFv7F_eLJWxeXvi7DyHAo7NOsHHeXnwkKCHnxD8j34&gQT=2
"OWC Archive Pro LTO-8 Thunderbolt Tape Storage/Archiving Solution, 0TB, No Software"
However, I still cannot make the math work.
For a $5,000 drive, I can still buy and shuck a bunch of external HDDs, at roughly $7/TB. So before buying any tapes at all, I would need to have 714TB of data to break even. (Of course not considering longevity or the hassle)
Checking back if older ones, like LTO-5 has dropped in price? And the answer is still no. At least not the easy to use external ones.
Did I miss anything?
Or is there a viable tape option for those of us with roughly 50TB - 100TB of data?