That’s why I initially got them to reorganize my raid setup and have them as backups in case I need them. So I’m using lto4 which is 800gb per tape (current standard is lto9 16TB per tape) And it really depends on how cheap you can get the drive for me I got a tape drive for like 200€ and bought bunch of tapes ~50 for 6€ per tape if you can get a LTO5 drive for a similar price you would only need half the amount of tapes. So all in for me it was 500€ but you can definitely buy less tapes if you don’t need that many all at once. For your 30tb that would be 228€ in tapes.

It was great fun researching the topic and comparing different eBay listings for hours 😅

Currently doing a full backup of 37TB to tape. Which I would normally do once per quarter but I got a smart error on one of my drive that I’ll have to replace but before shutting down and removing the drive I want to have a full backup I might even get warranty on the drive at least I got the last time this happened drive has lower then 200 days of runtime. We’ll see