I was just thinking the same thing. I was also thinking you can get a wide input voltage buck converter on amazon for cheap and use a bunch of cells in series as the UPS and the buck converter spits out 12V until it cant anymore. Then just wire up a charge controller to charge and balance your lead acid cells.

Have you tried replacing your country?

It depends on the generation. Older tapes and drives are a lot cheaper, especially second hand but hold less (tapes aren’t meant to be overwritten a lot though so typically you want unused. New old stock or new).

Most homelabbers use LTO-6 or 5, and you can also upgrade your drive and still read your old tapes (except for the newest generations iirc)

I haven’t looked at a price comparison for years, so I’m going off pre AI numbers. It was cheaper then spinning rust back then for $/TB (for my setup it was cheaper than rust by a massive margin since it have a quarter petabyte of storage. Amortizing a tape drive over that many tapes gets cheap quickly), but maybe its different now?

I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve been looking at NetBird.

Elevator pitch page

Maybe others who’ve used it or know more can chime in on if this is a good idea or not?