You used to be able to get modestly priced tape units for home use from the old "connects to the floppy controller" units with capacities in the tens of megabytes, up to some late-gen SCSI/IDE/parallel/early USB models that would be a couple of gigabytes, but still at home-friendly prices. What's today's answer? An enterprise-grade device that might put 10TB+ on a tape, but comes with a four-figure price tag and isn't really sold at Best Buy.

If I want to back up the house today (maybe 4 active PCs, 5-6Tb of total space), affordable choices are pretty much disc-based. I could choose a cheap NAS (ended up doing that with an old fanless Atom machine and a used 12TB datacentre drive) or get a USB-attached external drive. Even if I used BD-XL media, even my modest needs would be dozens of discs, plus getting a writer in a shrinking market. There are plenty of datahoarders with much bigger needs, but even for them, tape is completely outside the addressable market.