Okay so,
There are 3 ways I have used so far to get information about what the catalog has availble to restore. All of them give slightly different results.
1. If you go to the BAR GUI you can click on each image in each day one by one and select "preview media" and it will show you the tapes you need but you can't copy that data out to text. If you select multiple images by holding shift then the media ID shown in the preview is often the last one you clicked on and does not show all the tapes required to actually restore the data you selected. This is not only inefficient but completely impractical once you have run over 800 backups. However, I have always assumed that the list of available backups here is complete. Until now.
2. You can use the various outputs from bpimagelist to get different degrees of completeness, some of which are compatible with a database and some of which would require extensive reformatting to be usefull for any sort of records keeping. Information about tapes that have been written to multiple times may be missing.
3. (Admin Console) NetBackup Management > Reports > Tape Reports > Images on tape. This is where it gets strange. If you query a server name and leave the media ID blank you get a good combination of customizable data regarding backups in the catalog. This is the closest to being useful but raises more questions. It is a far more complete list than using #2 (bpimagelist) however there are some inconsistancies again. There are entries that bpimagelist shows that are not on the images on tape list and that is disturbing.
What is far worse is that there is one entry that shows up in the "images on tape" list that is not available from the BAR GUI or bpimagelist. This is unacceptable because if you were using the GUI you would not be able to recover this data. This image is not expired and should be the same Policy type as the others.
On a related note. There is a column for "policy type" in the images on tape list that should correspond to the "policy type" dropdown selector in the BAR GUI. This feild is blank. The policy type is Lotus Notes but you couldn't tell that from this report. Just blank. It was a good idea but nobody bothered to make it work.
The bottom line is that none of these methods can agree with eachother about what tapes and what days are available. Making tapes is great but eventually someone will want to get the data off of the tapes, right? That is why we make them. Perhaps 100% accountability and traceability is asking too much. I know, I am a pickey bastard and I complain too much.