I usual hang out on r/homelab and r/selfhosted but I am looking into a project that seems to fit in better here on r/HomeDataCenter. I want to see if I can get some LTO tape backup going without completely breaking the bank.

I am looking on eBay for used LTO tape drives. Current gens are far above my price range, so I have been looking at LTO6 or maybe LTO7. I know these are usually used in a large library with auto-loaders, but for my use case, I want to keep costs down, so I am OK with manually loading tapes. However, external enclosure self-contained LTO tape drives seem to be generally much more expensive on eBay than tape drives that are meant to be in a library. So, that leads me to my idea, and I'm hoping some of you might have some experience with these drives and can help sanity check my idea.

I came across this post about how HP LTO tape drives seem to "just work" as standalone units, with just a jumper pin setting, whereas IBM LTO drives can be set to standalone units with some hex code sent over to them. I looked into the GitHub tutorial-style page that was linked in that Reddit post, and it gave some details about the HBA fiber card used for that project.

For reference, I'm in the USA, so my price list here is in USD and using the US eBay.

• A 2-port fiber channel (FC) HBA card seems to be around $30, like this one
• An IBM LTO6 tape drive can be as low as around $150 with shipping, like this one
• While LTO7 would be great with its increased storage size, the price jumps by almost an order of magnitude, with an inexpensive used drive costing at least $1400, like this one
• I could get 20 LTO6 tapes, for a raw total of 50TB, for about $180, like this listing

Assuming I have a computer around with at least one free PCI-e slot and an SSD with at least 2.5 TB of free space that I can use as the space where I get the files ready and zipped up, ready to copy (which I certainly do), then my cost would be something like $180 for the drive and HBA and another $180 for 20 LTO6 tapes, bringing my total to $360 for 50 TB of storage. Now I might be able to get some great refurbished hard drives that could offer similar price per TB, but my focus here is on immutable backups that can be easily kept off site. That is what draws me to trying out tape backup. I want that extra protection against some sort of ransomeware or other attack messing up not only my main copy, but also my backup copy. (And I know that an offsite backup with some system that uses versioning would also help prevent against loss from ransomware attacks, and that is a fair option to consider. That is why I'm posting in this subreddit, because I know this idea is overkill, and I'm here looking for people who appreciate overkill.)

I know people tend to say that LTO tape backup is just too expensive to be practical until you have close to half a PB of data, but LTO6 seems to be a sweet spot right now, assuming I'm not missing something crucial in my plan here.

Please take a look at my parts list and let me know what I'm missing. Or if you have experience using LTO tape drives as standalone drives, please share your experience.