I am not clear at how selection criteria works but what I do is a simple configuration.

Create a group. Create a pool and mark the group for it and set pool as backup type. Label a set of tapes to this pool. Create client and mark it for the group. Now when the group starts, it backups the client on media that you labelled for this pool. If you have multiple backup devices, it will use the media from the device that has media labelled for it.

There should not be any issue with this. I have never used the Selection Criteria etc. but the above works good.

Rather than use auto-media management, have you considered disabling this feature and managing the pools/media manually?

I would NOT suggest using pool recycling as this will allow NetWorker to re-label media in to pools from the incorrect storage. Which is what you effectivly have happening.

This is exactly what I have been doing. The problem comes when the tapes I have manually labeled become used up and auto media management kicks in to label a new tape. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it will label a tape on the other library..

I have considered it, but this would require a lot of manual effort on my part which I am hoping to avoid. We have several different pools because we require various retention policys depending on what is being backed up. I forsee manually managing this would become quite a headache..

Well, you can always disable auto media management for disk library - can't you? AMM for VTL doesn't make much sense. Eventually you can tie devices to pool.

If I do this, would that mean I need to manually label all VTL tapes? Do you suggest I use only one media pool on the VTL instead of several?

Thanks for the info. I will try this and see if it solves my problem. Thanks again.

Last time I worked with VTL I was asked by VTL software how many tapes I wanted and how many devices. After calculation I did enter that data and within seconds that was created. In NW, after library configuration, I labeled all tapes to SCRATCH pool and made them recyclable. I enabled recycle to for that pool and recycle from for pools sitting in VTL and that's it. AMM makes sense where you have fairly big exchange of tapes on daily/weekly basis and where that change means big number of new tapes introduced to tape robot.