Roger -

Topic "Restoral performance" in http://people.bu.edu/rbs/ADSM.QuickFacts
summarizes factors which will help.
In particular, minimize MOUNTRetention so that drives are ready for the
next mount asap.
If possible, see if your networking people can provide direct, high-
speed
networking to that client, at least for this emergency.
Where fast recovery is needed, it may in some cases be realistic to
start
the restoral alongside the server, as for example where you could have a
same-OS surrogate client with same-filesystem-type internal or external
drives where you could repopulate them via restoral and then give them
over to the disaster site to plug into their system as is.
An alternative is to start collocating via Move Data ahead of the
pending
restoral effort, to help make that faster.  This would also deal with
the
almost inevitable case of some long-unused tapes which are now difficult
to read, ahead of time.

I'm sure others, who have had to deal with such a situation, will post
other ideas.

   Richard Sims    at Boston University (no fires yet)