I know one or two members use tape drives for home backups, and I've recently found myself looking at some used drives on ebay but TBH I don't really know what I'm looking for, so it would be good to get some advice from those who do have them, and hopefully provide some reference for others looking to do the same.
At the moment I cycle a couple of offline HDDs to make entire rsync mirrors of my NAS HDD (which in turn contains various other backups). However, with only a couple of drives and regular cycling, it's possible to inadvertently delete something, only for the delete to propagate to the mirror drives before it's noticed.
Of course, incremental/differential backups with sufficient copies can guard against that scenario, but they're really not practical for larger volumes of data, especially if the contents changes significantly between backups.
It would be nice to have at least some of the contents archived for a while i.e. on tapes, as you can keep large archives relatively cheaply because of the low cost of the tapes themselves.
Of course, the drives themselves tend to be very expensive new, so it only becomes a feasible method of backup over HDDs with large amounts of archiving. Used drives OTOH can go for more palatable prices, hence my interest.
