You need ot think about how often you need to access the data. If it's once or twice a year, then the added overhead of having to find and load a tape wouldn't add up that quickly and IMO should be acceptable.

However, for projects you currently work on, you'd want hard drives and/or SSDs, preferably on a network, I suppose. Unless all your in0flight footage resides on the computers you edit them on (in which case I hope they have redundant storage).

Also, if any of your clients needed some archived data, would it be feasible to come back to the tapes, read, upload and share them? If you had a NAS and a fast enough internet connection, you may be able to host a site yourself, thus no need for reading the tape and uploading to a cloud.

Also, if it's video footage, then you shouldn't really count on LTO's compression ability. It's not particularly good for pictures and videos.

Have a look on ebay, there are some good deals to be had. You could probably get an LTO-5 for around $150-200, although you'll need a SAS controller and cabling, which could add an extra $50. So the initial cost is definitely higher, but once you're past that, it's much nicer to have large 1.5-2.5TB tapes than lots of discs.

If you're hoarding that much data and you need cold storage, you may want to have a look at tapes. LTO-5 and LTO-6 drives are quite cheap to come by and tapes are less expensive than discs on a per-GB basis.

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