Why do tape drives seen to be best? What’s your use case? They’re still used in enterprise environments because they’re insanely dense compared to hard disks, and it’s real easy to load a truck with a few petabytes to ship elsewhere. Is that what you need? Density? Seems like not for just a few gigs.

If you want backups you need to ship your media, tapes or otherwise, off-site.

Pop your files into a cloud service and call it done. If you’re looking for long term archives and don’t want to use other people’s computers, burn some DVDs and store them at someone else’s house.

Devops will have more job openings, network will have a higher salary, especially as you become more senior.

Devops people who don’t know networking and/or general traditional sysadmin work are a crushing pain in the ass for those of us who have to support them though. Networking background will make you better at devops, but not necessarily vice versa.

What in the world is “a proprietary OS I cannot trust”. What’s your actual threat model? Have you actually run any risk analyses or code audits against these OSes vs. (i assume) Linux to know for sure that you can trust any give FOSS OS? You do realize there’s still an OS on your dumb switch, right?

This is a silly reason to not learn to manage your networking hardware.