NetBackup does not allocate new media based upon policies themselves but upon volume pools and retention levels.  If you had different volume pools being used by each policy, then NBU behaved properly.  If you have different retention levels in play in each schedule in each policy, then that will cause an increased usage of tapes.

Another feature that could help is limiting the number of active media in the volume pools.  In the admin console, click on the Volume Pool option in the left hand navigation pane to bring up the list of volume pools.  Right mouse button click on a volume pool in the right hand frame and select Change from the context menu.  There should an option to "Maximum number of partially full media".  By default it is set to 0 which means as many as needed.  If you set it down to 1, only one media from this volume pool will be active.  Be careful as this is not media type aware.  If you are using the same volume pool for both LTO4 and LTO5 media, then only one will be active.  Could be LTO4 or it could be LTO5 depending upon which job queued up first.  In your case, I would try 3 for now making some guesses on how you have this all configured.

You can forward over some of the details of the volume pools you have and the policy information.  We'd be happy to help you sort through them.

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