> Bob
> Correct, in order to do any import, thte tape MUST be known 
> by NetBackup, however if its expired,

That betrays your mindset (not beating up on you, just pointing out that
you're thinking in terms of your "current system and 3-year-old tape"
scenario; I'm encouraging you to think bigger-picture, more generally:
EADS Astrium and Simon Weaver do not exist any more; but a pile of your
offsite tapes are being brought to my computer room.  "Expiration" has
no meaning in this context--I know _nothing_ about them.  The inventory
process is how those tapes become known to my NetBackup domain.

> my guess is, the tape ends up in SCRATCH, as it
> treats it as a NEW tape, even though we need to use it for import.

Perhaps you have a barcode rule that puts anything it finds into a
SCRATCH pool, but that is only because you have set it up that way.  You
can add new media to any pool you want, so I'm going to create the
EADS_Astrium pool and use the inventory process to put those 200 tapes
into that pool.  See Advanced Robot Inventory Options | Media Settings |
Volume Pool.  BTW, I'd be putting these tapes in write-protect if they
weren't that way already.

> I recall something along the lines of creating a pool called NBCC or
> something like that.... A pool that you move the tape to for 
> the import
> process. I think the special pool created is treated as a safe pool.
> 
> Would this sound right to you as part of your BBP method :-)

No, that would be somebody's convention.  ("NBCC" usually means
"NetBackup Consistency Check", BTW.)  No pools that you can create are
in any way special (though the "scratch" attribute can be assigned to
one pool).

Again, it'll be much more productive to just _do_ it.  One experiment
trumps a hundred speculative emails to a list.