What I have said is that for this kind of home users external HDDs are obviously the right solution as long as the total amount of stored data is not much more than 100 TB.
For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability.
Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations.
Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.
For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability.
Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations.
Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.