I don’t disagree with you that tape has a different value prop, but I sell backup systems and almost nobody I sell to uses tape anymore. The truth with tape is that it’s a cheap media, but you still need to pay someone to vault it for you, it cannot be accessed easily, it makes physical moves which cause damage and tape drive tech is still one of the most complicated things in the Datacenter.

Most companies I deal with want the data to be “online” in at least some form that can be easily accessed for AI, lawsuits, new research, business continuity, etc. Tape allows none of that, and so the value of it is pretty limited. The truth these days is I can stuff a TB of data into cloud archive, with instant retrieval, for really, really cheap, with like 99.99999999999% data durability guarantees, for dollars a month.