Adrian,
I must be expressing myself badly because you do not understand me.

My copypool tapes are housed in an offsite tape library. They never
leave there unless they go bad. The move nodedata's run there, on the
offsite library-- on its drives.  We do not use a courier to move
tapes between our local tape library and an offsite vault. We use
server to server/virtual volumes for our copy pools. It works very well.

If you are not setup this way, then you would be constrained to
retrieve your copypool tapes from the offsite vault to run move
nodedatas.

Best wishes,
Keith Arbogast