Backup Tapes Come Back to the Homelab

What happened

Backup Tapes Come Back to the Homelab, according to Hackaday. It’s one of the great mysteries of computing, how somehow in the Year Of OLlama 2026, tape remains the god of cheap storage. A while back [Ben Pettis] recounted his experience setting up an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, an experience which only becomes more relevant as hard drive prices stay high.

LTO-5 is already well out of date in the professional world, after all– a new server install would be debating the merits of LTO-9 versus LTO-10, but for the homelab it’s a matter of what’s affordable on the used market with decently-sized cartridges. If you can live with 1.5 TB of uncompressed data on a roughly palm-sized Linear Tape, Open cartridge then LTO-5 could be good enough.

Yes, the tapes are advertized as 3GB, but that’s assuming a 2:1 compression ratio on the data, which you’re not likely to get on the photos and video that make up much of a data horder’s storage. He also detailed his adventures with the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel model of drive.