Tape absolutely isn't viable for the consumer at all, but definitely worth exploring for the novelty. Even if you manage to get a pretty good deal on a legacy LTO system (other formats don't even come close to the tb/$ of 10+ year old LTO and drives are still fairly cheap), the drives aren't being made any more and aren't getting any cheaper. Backwards compatibilty may be in your favor depending on your choice of tape generation at least, I think there's at least two generations guaranteed. Optical will probably remain king though the pricing is worse than HDDs, there's no shortage of DVD or BD readers, but you might run into issues with quad layer 128 BD as they only hit the market fairly recently.