Well, you can test this easily. I agree, there are a lot of
things that needs to be taken under consideration - usually
you do not optimize your system for cloning.
1. NW can of course read as fast as it had backed up.
Or in other words: If you can keep the drive streaming
during a backup, why shouldn't it be possible to keep it
streaming during a read (clone) process. You just need
to ensure that you can shuffle the data away fast enough.
2. Consequently, you just need to make sure that you "need"
all the data. For example, if you read a multiplexed
tape, you will most unlikely recover ALL multiplexed save
sets at the SAME time. This already decreases the
throughput. Same is true for cloning of course.
3. You can definitively clone a multiplexed tape in a single
pass. But you need to do it in a clever way. As i said,
NW intends to support your effort but again this depends
on a lot of other things like drive contention.
The easiest way to achieve this is by starting a clone
process manually by using the command line:
nsrclone -S ssid_1 ssid_2 ... ssid_n
Also, please make sure that you tape is not positioned
beyond the beginning of one of these save sets.
For more details, please look at the doc i mentioned.
Unfortunately, since "rebranded" to SalesNet, you can not browse through Legato's PartnerNet page for these docs any more. But they are there.
Simply uise the search tool (upper right corner) and look
for "tid". Then open issue 0303. BTW - another good resource
are the "Technical Info Newsletters" (tin), but this info
is more briefly.
Let me know what you think about it.