> Where did you get the gear?

I have an old Quantum DLT S4 drive and something like 18 tapes. Each tape is 800GB uncompressed and I get about 1.8x compression on average. It's an external unit connected via SCSI ultra 320. The ultra 320 SCSI card is something I picked up from ebay for like $20. The drive and tapes I got from a former consulting client who was going to trash it.

It was the last of the DLT line and is similar to LTO4. Get an LTO5 if possible; it has some cool features like partitions.

I only store my most critical stuff on tapes. Each weekend I do a tape swap and take the old tape to work on Monday and bring the oldest one back. I keep the tapes at work in case my house burns down or something (I lived through two house fires as a kid so I'm super neurotic about it, don't ask). The tapes are encrypted so nobody can recover from them if they get one. If my house did burn down I'd have to somehow procure another tape drive, but that would be the least of my problems.

I just use a custom tar script to do it. I tried both Bacula and Amanda in the past but they were too complicated or had other issues. My own tar script did what I wanted.

> How cost-effective is the overall setup compared to spinning rust?

Since I got most of it for free and I already had experience with tape, it was pretty good. I've had it since 2008 so it's over ten years old and still going. I also have some UBS3 backup disks that I use for daily backups. In all this time, only one tape has died and I do a full validation of the previous backups every time I bring a tape back and re-use it.

For new installs, go with some USB3 disks from Seagate or WD -- both are great, I have both. Avoid Toshiba due to some weaknesses in handling bumps and vibration during runtime due to firmware (Toshiba internal drives are great though) -- Don't ask me how I know this. Seal them into some kind of fire-proof/flood-proof safe and store somewhere that a fire/flood won't destroy it.

> How is driver support in popular operating systems?

I'm all linux. It works. All that matters is the SCSI card being supported. Make sure NOT to get a RAID card, regular SCSI only. The RAID cards often won't work with tape drives because the firmware is made for RAID drives, not tape.

> Is there more you'd recommend taking into consideration or learning before jumping in? Especially beyond the obvious realities of extremely high latency, of course ;)

So the only real advantage for me using tapes is that I got most of it for free, the tapes are more portable and lighter than a USB hard drive for carrying around. Almost everything else is a negative compared to USB hard drives.

I use some UBS3 hard drives for daily backups via an rsync --link-dest script that de-duplicates everything and that works great. For $100 you can get a 4-6GB USB hard drive from WD or Seagate and for my important stuff, that works fine.

I'm about to fill up my older 5GB drive -- it's down to about 200GB free space left. I already have a new 6TB drive I brought recently and when it gets down a little lower, I'll just replace it, do full backups, and put the old drive into storage for permanent archival.

Data backups is a full occupational specialty, like being a DBA, network engineer, security, or web monkey. I did TSM for awhile. There's a ton of issues in the hardware, strategy, security, performance, and more.

Do yourself a favor and just set up something simple that JUST WORKS and don't fuck with it too much.

Do a practice recovery once and that'll teach you how good your setup is and improve.