Are you doing it? If so, can you recommend a tape drive that works on Linux, and any other advice?
SSDs are so much nicer maintenance wise.. but having a tape changer on your rack wasting energy at home is another type of nerd cool.
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.
(have managed tape in both professional and personal use cases)
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.