Actually the Pools do not have retention periods, it is the backup schedule that chooses a retention period for the backup image.

Some people like to micro manage and set up pools based on day of the week, incr or fulls or in your case on retention period.  It just over complicates everything.  Use one volume pool if you can and let the policy do the retention and let NB expire items when it wants.

You can create a new pool (that does not have a name that reference a retention period and change your policies to start using it, and as tapes expire they go back to scratch or you move them out of the pool.  Once all are expired remove the old pool and stop the confusion.

Single Volume Pool with multiple retention is good, as long as images with multiple retention never write on same volume. By Default, NBU will not allow images with different retention to be written on same media.

Hi Dan,

Please mark a solution or continue the line of questioning if not satisfied.

Pools are better used to define volume ownership and related charge-back (divisions, departments, workgroups, projects, ...) Perhaps easier for some to track and manage than billing against GBs backed up. Another approach for smaller shops would be to use pools to define what kind of backup data do you expect to find on the associated volumes (SQL_pool, Exchange_pool, FileShare_pool, UserPC_pool ...).

That was good advice given earlier in this thread to try to keep the number of pools down, unless you have a huge scratch pool, otherwise you're bound to run into more error code 96s during your backups.

Thanks for all the input here guys. I really appreciate it.