Tape Backup in 2025 - Still a viable option? The why, what and how...

Is tape backup / archival still a viable option in 2025? We take a look at all the non-hard-drive storage options, explore a number of dead media formats in a brief history of tape backup, look at the state of optical media, then do a dive into how a tape drive actually operates, and what it looks like when you connect one up. There's also 'one weird trick' to get a cheaper LTO-6 tape drive, and finally, we show a backup being done with the open source backup software BareOS.

00:00 Intro
00:13 Why backup?
00:50 Why tape?
01:32 The formats we're not going to use
04:46 What about optical media?
08:10 The LTO Consortium
09:26 LTO Tape generations - which one?
13:13 How do you connect a tape drive? SAS, Fibre Channel, SCSI, USB?
15:01 Rewiring a tape library drive to work standalone
17:49 Using a tape drive - how does it appear?
20:10 BareOS - why you should use actual backup software
20:57 Spooling - where to?
21:58 Config for two backups
22:26 Cleaning tapes - how, why and when?
22:59 Tape packs and barcode labels
23:47 Pricing and cloud-based alternatives
26:29 Outro - back on the supply side of the problem!