They used to be a lot cheaper. When I did admin work for a small company ~2004 they weren't as cheap as a DVD R/W, but they were still pretty inexpensive, and I kept rotating 7-day backups on them along with a monthly rotation, and IIRC the system itself was RAID 3. When I upgraded the server I think the DAT tape drive, 4GB per tape, only added a a few hundred dollars.
These days a new tape drive goes into the thousands. It's a shame because it's still very difficult to beat tape for high capacity unpowered offline storage. Some optical formats have longer shelf lives but lower capacities, and also aren't cheap.
I'm glad I don't have to worry about backup/restore in my job anymore. I had to make use of those daily tapes more than once and the stress of that was not fun.
These days a new tape drive goes into the thousands. It's a shame because it's still very difficult to beat tape for high capacity unpowered offline storage. Some optical formats have longer shelf lives but lower capacities, and also aren't cheap.
I'm glad I don't have to worry about backup/restore in my job anymore. I had to make use of those daily tapes more than once and the stress of that was not fun.