Is it time to get into domestic LTO?

I framed the title of this post in the form of a Betteridge Headline, because the answer is almost certainly no. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… it still has me thinking. It was conventional wisdom in the Before Times™ that storage prices were falling, and would continue to fall, in the following ways: Solid state storage was becoming exponentially denser and more affordable, to the point where it was feasible they could overtake hard drives on a cost per byte basis. Hard drives were continuing to defy the laws of physics by becoming even bigger, and could still prove valuable for bulk storage and backups even if SSDs ate their lunch. Tape was therefore a dead-end technology, and should be phased out for The Cloud and hard drives for cold storage. These assumptions no longer hold. While the density, capacity, and performance of these drives continue to improve, the cost has inverted thanks to our two favourite letters in the Latin alphabet. This has made me…