I’ve been using tape libraries since the early 2000’s and I agree I wouldn’t be bothered to have to deal with them in my homelab. Just having to manage rotations and so on… uuuugh no thanks.

Have you tried Immich? It runs local and is open source. I haven’t yet but was planning to soon as I have the same struggle

Those dang surveillance birds at it again

I do this continually for work as well, I approach every new project assuming best practice or approach options have changed. It doesn’t matter how experienced I am in what I’m doing, I still loop back and check.

It’s such an automatic thing I don’t even think about it, but honestly not sure if it’s because of interest or because of fear of being called out for doing something wrong lol