What I'm really trying to figure out is how EV handles bulk un-archiving of SharePoint content .

I'll use a scenario, because it makes what I'm trying to explain easier to understand...

Assume that a group of 250 users within ClientSite are being moved to the newly created XYZ company.  The new company It is completely separate from ClientSite and will share no information or IT systems. The new company has a vanilla SharePoint 2010 environment and needs content from the following SharePoint objects to be supplied in the form of content database backups or STSADM/Powershell backups.

• 2 site collections from different web applications
• 4 document libraries from the intranet site collection
• 2 subsites from within the HR Policy Site Collection

Assume that 30% of the content in these logical components has been archived to disk by EV.

• How would the administrator go in terms of unarchiving the 30% of content stored on disk into the backup?
• If they ran a native backup of a SharePoint content database in SQL which contained 500 stubs to documents that have been archived by EV would the backup "suck-in" the file-stored documents into the database backup?
• What about if they ran a Site Collection backup?  Would archived content be included in the backup file or just the placeholder?

I realise that these questions are quite technical and very SharePoint specific and may well require a SharePoint-savvy techo to answer.