Active - means is 'available for use', as opposed to Frozen or Suspended
(Frozen should be for bad tapes only (or suspected bad) they will never expire. Suspended is a manually chosen state (the Vault option can also do this) which means a tape won't be used again, until it expires.
Scratch - Empty tape in a 'scratch volume pool' which can therefore be allocated fpr backups/ duplications
Expired - Once all the images on a tape pass their expire date, the tape moves into an expired state itself. It is then, deleted from the 'media DB' once the cleanup job runs. If a tape is known to NBU (appears in the media bit of the GUI) it IS in the 'volumr DB' - vmquery -m <media id> will display it. A tape is only in the 'media DB' if it has an 'assign time', which means it contains unexpired images. There are a few times this is not true (the backup has just started and the image hasn't been written yet, all images have expired but the tape hasn't yet been deleted from the media DB). If a tape is in the 'media DB' - bpmedialist -m <media ID> will report on that tape (if it's not, you get a message saying it's not assigned to the EMM host).
Vault - This will relate to tapes that have been taken offsite
