>I'm trying to determine two things:
>
>1) What is the best way to configure NetBackup for indefinite offsite
>storage of all of the full backups.

Off the top of my head, I'd do it this way:

1) Create a separate pool for the offsite tapes (just makes life easier
later).
2) Do your full backups with a retention time set to 'infinity'.  That
way they will never expire.  If you don't do that, NB will remove
the data from the catalogue when your tapes expire.  (You can reimport
the tapes later, but that's an extra step you just don't need to do.)
I'd definitely turn on catalogue compression (otherwise with lots of
infinite retentions you'll be using up tons of disk space for 
the catalogue).
3) Do a catalogue backup to a tape destined to go off site.  This could be
step 6, depends on whether you want the catalogue tape to reflect the 
work done in the next two steps.
4) Eject the tapes.  Move them offsite.
5) Parse through your offsite pool to move the tapes to a new volume group
(can't change volume groups if the tapes are still in the library).  
'volmgr/bin/vmchange' command.  If you have a scratch pool defined, and the
offsite pool empty before you do your backups, then it's really easy.  
You can just change the volume group for every tape in the offsite pool 
(barring tape errors of course).
6) Send some paper output to the vault with the tapes.  At the very
least, which tape is the catalogue tape. ;)

This is somewhat similar to what we do, except we duplicate our tapes, so
that we can keep a copy in our library for restores.  We couldn't justify
the cost of NB Vault for our situation, but the above is easily scriptable
and run out cron.


-- 
Jeff Bryer                              bryer AT sfu DOT ca
Systems Administrator                   (604) 291-4935
Academic Computing, Simon Fraser University