Supported Tape Drives

Bacula uses standard operating system calls (read, write, ioctl) to interface to tape drives. As a consequence, it relies on having a correctly written OS tape driver. Bacula is known to work perfectly well with SCSI tape drivers on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and Windows machines, and it may work on other *nix machines.

Recently there are many new drives that use IDE, ATAPI, or SATA interfaces rather than SCSI. On Linux the OnStream drive, which uses the OSST driver is one such example, and it is known to work with Bacula. In addition a number of such tape drives (i.e. OS drivers) seem to work on Windows systems. However, non-SCSI tape drives (other than the OnStream) that use ide-scsi, ide-tape, or other non-scsi drivers do not function correctly with Bacula (or any other demanding tape application) as of today (April 2007). If you have purchased a non-SCSI tape drive for use with Bacula on Linux, there is a good chance that it will not work. We are working with the kernel developers to rectify this situation, but it will not be resolved in the near future.

Generally any modern tape drive (i.e. after 2010) will work out of the box with Bacula using the standard Bacula Device specification in the bacula-sd.conf file.

Please check the Tape Testing 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.

Note

If your tape hardware and operating system are relatively new (<10 years), they will cooperate smoothly.