Most blank tapes of that era had the 5 second lead-in, and that part of the tape was the same head cleaning material. I also never believed it worked and always cleaned the heads with an alcohol soaked cotton swab. Good ole days, mix tapes and mullets.
Well thank you, but you haven't tried to explain any of this VERY basic concept you speak of, you've just told me that RAID isn't backup. No one but you brought up RAID.
Nice try, son. Now, stick to mansplaining something you actually understand and can articulate.
None of those programs verifies integrity. Borg deduplicates, and optionally encrypts data. Restic is a front end for rsync, which only offers incremental back up. Meaning, restic/rsync compares your source and destination directories, and if the data are identical it does nothing, but if there are any changes it will upload only that changed data. None of the apps care what the data are, you can backup gibberish and they will happily put it another place for you.
Pulsedmedia has some decently priced offerings. I've used them a few times here and there. Pretty solid. You can probably find something to your liking in the neighborhood of 9 to 10 bucks a month.