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The latest LTO-tapes always costed a ton of money. When LTO-5 were released years ago, they were also way out of price.

Just stick with "one-generation behind" unless you really need the space. LTO-5 tapes are $25 for 1.5TB of data. Plenty cheap if you actually use enough tapes to make the $2000 tape-drive worth the cost.

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I just checked on newegg and LTO-4 drives are still over $1,000!

I remember about 20 years ago, it was quite reasonable to use tapes as backup even as a consumer.

If one generation behind would cost less than $500 I would think it would actually capture some of the consumer market.

Otherwise consumers have cloud and BD as backup and that's it.

The drives are expensive still, largely because the consumer level products no longer exist. Unfortunately a USB hard disk is the closest thing to backup that most consumers will touch. and for these that are serious other technologies tend to take the place.

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