Nathan - Your "disk buffer" thought on speeding restores is excellent.

That gives me another idea...
With today's cheap, capacious disks, it would be nice to have our backups
directed to Disk type (random access) storage pools; and if that kind of
storage pool were allowed to have Collocation, and were further enhanced to
specify Caching of only Active files (such that Inactive files would migrate
out to tape), that disk storage pool would end up as a repository of all the
Active files for that file system, and thus be available for extremely fast
restorals (technical term: "lickety-split").

Well, the developers said they were seeking real-world ideas from customers...

     Richard Sims, Boston University OIT