It depends on the generation. Older tapes and drives are a lot cheaper, especially second hand but hold less (tapes aren’t meant to be overwritten a lot though so typically you want unused. New old stock or new).

Most homelabbers use LTO-6 or 5, and you can also upgrade your drive and still read your old tapes (except for the newest generations iirc)

I haven’t looked at a price comparison for years, so I’m going off pre AI numbers. It was cheaper then spinning rust back then for $/TB (for my setup it was cheaper than rust by a massive margin since it have a quarter petabyte of storage. Amortizing a tape drive over that many tapes gets cheap quickly), but maybe its different now?

I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve been looking at NetBird.

Elevator pitch page

Maybe others who’ve used it or know more can chime in on if this is a good idea or not?

Not OP but the pension system was built when 3% of people or less made it past 65, and everyone was having 5 kids that all moved out, got married, and were supposed to have 5 kids as well. We don’t have enough young kids to pay into the system to support the tsunami of old people forced to retire soon, and our young kids make fuck all to pay for the system for 20 years because the job market and TFW programs ate up all the entry level jobs they could have gotten valuable work experience with and cut their teeth on.

That also doesn’t even begin to touch all the other ways the older generation have stolen the future of young people, but it’s the one that affects old people the most when the system implodes.