Backup Tapes Come Back To The Homelab

Tape storage remains surprisingly cost-effective for homelab data hoarders despite being outdated in enterprise settings. Drawing on another hobbyist's writeup, this piece recaps setting up an LTO-5 tape drive, noting real-world capacity is far below the advertised 3TB (closer to 1.5TB uncompressed), the cheaper fiber channel drive option, and a crossover cable gotcha needed when connecting without a switch. At roughly $2/TB for used tapes versus $16/TB for the cheapest hard drives, tape can pay for itself quickly for large data hoards.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/10/12/backup-tapes-come-back-to-the-homelab. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.