Having a look LTO-6 tapes are now about $40 US per cartridge vs about $80 for a 2 TB hard drive. However, with tape you get the advantages that should be considered along with the disadvantages. LTO tapes are rated for at least 20 years in a stable shelf environment - if you're buying cheap hard drives you generally don't want to trust them as archival media particularly when you're only able to get max 5 year warranty on them. LTO tapes generally are very reliable when being shipped around regularly (i.e. for offsite archiving) compared to hard drives. You can also get relatively cheap autoloaders that can queue up 8+ tapes at at time for long backup & archive jobs that you can cycle tapes in/out of without interrupting things compared to a RAID system. They also clock 160 MiB/sec write speeds which is fairly acceptable with the use of an autoloader and D2D2T backup. They are also easier to make write-only, and the ability to mess up a tape is much harder from a file system corruption point of view unless you use LTFS.
The downsides are that LTO drives are expensive compared to buying bare drives (or USB drives). Once you step up to a disk based RAID array it gets comparable however. You also obviously don't get random access to your data when you want it like a nice RAID unit. They also almost exclusively use SAS or FC connections which most people don't have (a few have USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt now, like mLogic or IBM) which means you can't fit to a basic computer easily without some work.
I personally use tape for my archival backup now having invested in a system to do it (and I'm what I consider a consumer). RAID systems are nice but they don't cover mistakes, file system corruption or hardware failures which could happen and wipe out terabytes of data. With offline tape I can simply restore it if/when I require it.
The issue is that when you buy storage you should consider the backup requirements at the same time. I see a lot of people getting RAIDs or Drobos considering the hardware failure angle but not the malicious/filesystem corruption angle (i.e. someone using sudo rm -rf/*) and unless they have them online a lot you never know when your backup drive has failed as well (or failed when you really need it). For small business I'd say RDX cartridges get the equivalent lifespan of tape however in a more convenient format ($150 for a chassis + cartridge costs) so this would be a viable solution for small businesses for archiving legally required data for 7+ years.
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The downsides are that LTO drives are expensive compared to buying bare drives (or USB drives). Once you step up to a disk based RAID array it gets comparable however. You also obviously don't get random access to your data when you want it like a nice RAID unit. They also almost exclusively use SAS or FC connections which most people don't have (a few have USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt now, like mLogic or IBM) which means you can't fit to a basic computer easily without some work.
I personally use tape for my archival backup now having invested in a system to do it (and I'm what I consider a consumer). RAID systems are nice but they don't cover mistakes, file system corruption or hardware failures which could happen and wipe out terabytes of data. With offline tape I can simply restore it if/when I require it.
The issue is that when you buy storage you should consider the backup requirements at the same time. I see a lot of people getting RAIDs or Drobos considering the hardware failure angle but not the malicious/filesystem corruption angle (i.e. someone using sudo rm -rf /*) and unless they have them online a lot you never know when your backup drive has failed as well (or failed when you really need it). For small business I'd say RDX cartridges get the equivalent lifespan of tape however in a more convenient format ($150 for a chassis + cartridge costs) so this would be a viable solution for small businesses for archiving legally required data for 7+ years.