The world of tape backup was (is?) absolutely filled with all sorts of vendor-lock in projects and tools. It's a complete mess.
And even various versions of tar aren't compatible, and that's not even starting with star and friends.
And even various versions of tar aren't compatible, and that's not even starting with star and friends.
Then there's slightly more obscure formats that didn't take off in the western world, and the physical mediums too. Not many people had the pleasure of having to extract hundreds of "GCA" files off of MO disks using obscure Japanese freeware from 2002. The English version of the software even has a bunch of flags on virustotal that the standard one doesn't. And there's obscure LZH compression algorithms that no tool available now can handle.
I've found myself setting up one-time Windows 2000/XP VMs just to access backups made after 2000.
If your dataset is below 1-2Tb it would cost you less than $200 in a decade to move to a newer HDD every 5 years.
Absolutely not worth it tho. Drives are hideously expensive which means they only start making sense where you have at least dozens of tapes.
There is an advantage of tapes not being electrically connected most of the time so lightning strike will not burn your archives, I have pondered making a separate box with a bunch of hard drives that boots once a month and just copies last months of backups on hard drives, powered from solar or something just to separate from the network
What’s fun are the hard drive based systems designed to perfectly imitate a tape autoloader so you don’t have to buy new backup software (virtual tape libraries).