Tape is still very popular. There has been a new LTO version released every few years. The recent ones are only backwards compatible with the previous version and the older ones supported 2 previous generations. If you need to read 20 year old data from an LTO tape, you will have to find an old drive that’s compatible with that version.
There is a surprising amount of equipment still reliant on 3.5" floppy disks. Unfortunately it’s getting much harder to find new old stock disks. Many of the older disks are degrading now. I’ve had some where a lot of the magnetic material gets worn off after a single read. At least there are floppy drive emulators now that can be used to prolong the life of older equipment as long as it doesn’t use a weird format or interface.
Tape is still very popular. There has been a new LTO version released every few years. The recent ones are only backwards compatible with the previous version and the older ones supported 2 previous generations. If you need to read 20 year old data from an LTO tape, you will have to find an old drive that’s compatible with that version.
There is a surprising amount of equipment still reliant on 3.5" floppy disks. Unfortunately it’s getting much harder to find new old stock disks. Many of the older disks are degrading now. I’ve had some where a lot of the magnetic material gets worn off after a single read. At least there are floppy drive emulators now that can be used to prolong the life of older equipment as long as it doesn’t use a weird format or interface.