I'm not going to actually suggest LTO-7, but what do you think is a reasonable per-month cost for backing up your important data? If it's in the $5-$10 range then you can afford a $600 drive and some tapes.

> Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes).

"regularly" can be 10 years. Your new equipment doesn't need to read your old tapes. If you advance by 4 generations, you can buy 1 new tape to replace 10 old tapes. And the newer generations have abandoned that feature anyway.