As a kid, we had one of those home/small business targeted drives that attached to the PC via the floppy drive controller. QIC, or whatever it was called. Native capacity was ~120 MB, and the drive had some built-in compression so it was marketed as 250 MB. It made a horrible screeching noise when running.
Linux even had a driver for it at some point (ftape), but IIRC it has since been removed due to lack of use. Never used it though, by the time I got more into Linux that drive was already obsolete.
But yeah, today the startup cost of a tape drive is so high that it doesn't make sense for home usage. At home I use borg backup (https://www.borgbackup.org/ ) nowadays, backing up to external USB hard drives.
I had a HP colorado backup (400/800), I think it's QIC like.
Tried to use it on an old p3 box with win95, and was utterly surprised that win95 backup application had support for generic backup tape drives that allowed me to restore the tape content.
I also love the super smooth mechanical sounds of tape drives, even at the cost of slow seek.
Linux even had a driver for it at some point (ftape), but IIRC it has since been removed due to lack of use. Never used it though, by the time I got more into Linux that drive was already obsolete.
But yeah, today the startup cost of a tape drive is so high that it doesn't make sense for home usage. At home I use borg backup (https://www.borgbackup.org/ ) nowadays, backing up to external USB hard drives.