Jon,

As others have indicated, from a disaster recovery perspective there is
little point in storing tapes for any extended length of time. This is due
to that fact that you will usually want to restore from the most recent
version(s).

If you then go on to store your backups indefinitely for legal or statutory
reasons the viability of the data would depend on many factors such as the
conditions the media is stored under and the type of media.

In reality your biggest concern should be your ability to interpret any
restored data into the future and not the readability of the media. Unlike
older technologies like 3480 new media like LTO has been designed to be
stored for many decades.

You should always use open backup formats such as tar if your backup
software gives you a choice. 

In addition LTO also has an inbuilt "health status" writable RFID chip. The
chip memory is updated each time a tape is unloaded from a drive and this
information can be used to determine the health of the media. In practical
terms this would allow you to periodically read archival tapes so that they
could be read for the purpose of determining their "health".

In the case of rotational tapes using the LTO health status chip takes the
guess work out of managing a tape pool; it is way better than throwing out
good tapes after some arbitrary number of uses. It also allows you to return
dud media at the time you purchase it.

There are several vendors who offer LTO health hardware, one company who
does this is MPTapes in Boulder.

Hope this helps,

Gerard

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