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.

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 Chapter of the Bacula manual for procedures that you can use to verify if your tape drive will work with Bacula.