The choice between magnetic tapes and disks depends mainly on the total amount of archived data.
Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.
Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.
I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.
When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf, then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than everything else.
However, the drives are expensive. This industry is in dire need of disruption.
Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology off-lease.
I can't imagine home users being interested in buying mostly used SCSI or SAS tape drives while navigating a world of format compatibility challenges and problems with improper storage. Environmental requirements for archival are narrow and most homes don't tick that box over many years or when moving.
This medium is expensive, inconvenient to use and store, and in the world of home use those are killers. You don't need to take my word for it, look around at tape home use.
Home users are better served by cloud storage or an external hard drive, maybe a home NAS, especially for the relatively low data volumes home usage usually involves.
Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.
Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.
I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.