I've been embracing LTO tapes as a personal long-term backup solution, and so far I'm very impressed by the cost efficiency for a very large amount of data storage. $0.004/GB is phenomenal.
But these "compressed" storage capacities are wild. "Assuming 2.5:1 compression"? That's a hell of an assumption. I guess if I were backing up 6.25TB of text or code or something I could pull that off on a 2.5TB tape, but c'mon now, it's just SLDC (LZS) compression. It isn't magic...
If you're backing up audio, video, or photos, you're going to have to assume native capacity. If there was some magical way to compress h264/h265 video down 2.5:1, people would be using it.
I can't imagine what the LTO Consortium thinks people would be backing up if they need the kinds of capacities supported by modern LTO tapes.
Just print the native capacity, and let me worry about compression. They print "45TB*" on the front of their 18TB LTO-9 tapes, and that feels like a scam.
Mind you, I know enough about compression to know what I was buying when I invested in this solution, but a significant consumer of LTO tapes are video producers and other media professionals, and they are never going to get the capacities advertised front and center because they are based on an absurd assumption that probably only applies to enterprise use cases.
