Can this be used imaging in junction with backup sets?

I have a few web servers with well over 500,000 small files. During a
recovery test it took many hours to restore this volume. I am testing
out the use of backup sets for recovery purposes (so I don't need to
build the TSM server first - there are a few servers I could start to
restore using backup sets while I restore the TSM server)

The other option was to add more drives to these servers, and execute a
command to compress all the little files into 1 for backup/restore,
which would increase these times 100X

Joe Cascanette
The Cumis Group Limited