Backwards compatibility is vastly overrated
Every lto purchase I've made has been a 3 generation hop.
Most people who use large scale lto deployments are in the same boat - you buy a robot with drives and 5 year support. At the end of that period you buy a new one as maintenance past that point is more expensive than buying.
Data migration if needed streams from old tape to disk to new tape. After that theyre burned. We don't bother migrating backups. Just keep the old kit around until the tapes expire then chuck the lot.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
