> I agree with the statement about pulling the whole list of files and this
> node is sizeable, however the session was not increasing the bytes sent or
> received, otherwise I would have just waited as it did this analysis.

Some restores are implemented as described above. In other cases the TSM
server identifies the files that match the selection criteria, extracts
information on these files from the database, and sorts the files to
minimize tape movement. The latter implementation is called "no query
restore". The client manual explains when no query restore is used.
A no query restore involving large numbers of files (tens of thousands
or more) may sit for quite a while with no data movement between client
and server.

In 1984 my employer had a development contract with IBM. The documentation
IBM provided included a copy of their product usability guidelines, which
required explicit progress indications for long running tasks. Almost
20 years later TSM is still not measuring up to the usability standards
IBM set for itself in 1984.