The older generations are pretty accessible price wise yes. They're pretty awful for home use though. Those tape drives are LOUD. Backing up my 90TB NAS takes a week. I don't want to sit in that squealing for a week in my flat. Restoring a single file is a PITA also.
I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.
> I just use a box full of old harddrives now, i basically use those like tape cassettes.
Re: hard drives – I gave up entirely on the idea of storing backups "at rest" indefinitely, and use two NASes at different sites. I only store ~50TB, and I plan to need to recover every five years (e.g. when a working computer finally gives up the ghost.) I end up replacing a HD in a ZFS pool once every two years.
Yeah I wish I could do that but I don't have the money to buy a double set of drives. I often upgrade my NAS by just swapping out a disk for a bigger one and the old one goes into the backup rotation. Right now I have 15 disks in there (and 8 in the actual NAS). Because they are of course smaller drives I need more of them to cover the content.
Buying hardware to keep 15 disks spinning is also pretty expensive :(