Even if your drive is on the list below, please check the Tape Testing Chapter of this manual for procedures that you can use to verify if your tape drive will work with Bacula. If your drive is in fixed block mode, it may appear to work with Bacula until you attempt to do a restore and Bacula wants to position the tape. You can be sure only by following the procedures suggested above and testing.
It is very difficult to supply a list of supported tape drives, or drives that are known to work with Bacula because of limited feedback (so if you use Bacula on a different drive, please let us know). Based on user feedback, the following drives are known to work with Bacula. A dash in a column means unknown:
| OS | Man. | Media | Model | Capacity |
| - | ADIC | DLT | Adic Scalar 100 DLT | 100GB |
| - | ADIC | DLT | Adic Fastor 22 DLT | - |
| - | - | DDS | Compaq DDS 2,3,4 | - |
| - | Exabyte | - | Exabyte drives less than 10 years old | - |
| - | Exabyte | - | Exabyte VXA drives | - |
| - | HP | Travan 4 | Colorado T4000S | - |
| - | HP | DLT | HP DLT drives | - |
| - | HP | LTO | HP LTO Ultrium drives | - |
| - | IBM | ?? | 3480, 3480XL, 3490, 3490E, 3580 and 3590 drives | - |
| FreeBSD 4.10 RELEASE | HP | DAT | HP StorageWorks DAT72i | - |
| - | Overland | LTO | LoaderXpress LTO | - |
| - | Overland | - | Neo2000 | - |
| - | OnStream | - | OnStream drives (see below) | - |
| - | Quantum | DLT | DLT-8000 | 40/80GB |
| Linux | Seagate | DDS-4 | Scorpio 40 | 20/40GB |
| FreeBSD 4.9 STABLE | Seagate | DDS-4 | STA2401LW | 20/40GB |
| FreeBSD 5.2.1 pthreads patched RELEASE | Seagate | AIT-1 | STA1701W | 35/70GB |
| Linux | Sony | DDS-2,3,4 | - | 4-40GB |
| Linux | Tandberg | - | Tandbert MLR3 | - |
| FreeBSD | Tandberg | - | Tandberg SLR6 | - |
| Solaris | Tandberg | - | Tandberg SLR75 | - |
There is a list of supported autochangers in the Supported Autochangers chapter of this document, where you will find other tape drives that work with Bacula.
Previously OnStream IDE-SCSI tape drives did not work with Bacula. As of Bacula version 1.33 and the osst kernel driver version 0.9.14 or later, they now work. Please see the testing chapter as you must set a fixed block size.
QIC tapes are known to have a number of particularities (fixed block size, and one EOF rather than two to terminate the tape). As a consequence, you will need to take a lot of care in configuring them to make them work correctly with Bacula.
Unless you have patched the pthreads library on most FreeBSD systems, you will lose data when Bacula spans tapes. This is because the unpatched pthreads library fails to return a warning status to Bacula that the end of the tape is near. Please see the Tape Testing Chapter of this manual for important information on how to configure your tape drive for compatibility with Bacula.
For information on supported autochangers, please see the Autochangers Known to Work with Bacula section of the Supported Autochangers chapter of this manual.