This seemed simple enough when I started… ;)

I’ve got a number of policies reflecting differing retention times (1 month retention for 1 month, 1 month each for 12 months, quarterly and a yearly). 

Dealing with disks, this is great, for the most part as the Dedupe never seems to grow tired of how much I torture it.  However, I’m finding that when I got to tape, we’re seeing jobs go to varying tape media.  One thing I’d like to hammer home, however, is that yearly backups are separate from anything else.  I don’t need something with a retain until being 2030 and something else on the same tape being 2023.  We have three tapes drives in our robot, I’d like to just spin one off and let it deal with the yearlies.  We have over 700 servers, so it’ll have more than enough use from the beginning of the year until around tax time.

First - is there a better way to handle this?  I know there are methods with policy names, combining streams, and multiplexing, which, frankly, all seems like playing one-handed pinball.  I’ve tried getting help from support, but they’re a “fix-only” operation and of no help.  My thought, at least for the yearly, was:

Second - I’ve created another library.  I’d simply like to remove one of the devices from the first library and put it into the second library.  I’ve convinced the robot that it has a another library and it has some tape slots dedicated to that.  But I don’t see any way to remove the tape from library A and assign it to B.

Any thoughts? ;)

Best wishes!