alt Hacker NewsThese companies charge a megabuck. Maintaining the drives doesn't come cheap. I am (like other ageing former mainframe operatives) the holder of a variety of tape forms, and nobody local wants the hassle of giving me a bitstream, without significant vig. Like thousands.
Recently the computer museum helped recover early 1970s unix tapes. It was a big deal.
I got introduced to LTO by needing to read several tapes with archival data. It was pretty cheap, around $200 back around 2014. I can certainly believe that the old mainframe tapes are way more trouble.
And let's not exaggerate the complexity of setting up external tape drives, even on Windows/macOS.