Thanks to all the people who replied to my questions about NDMP restores from NetApp using Networker 6.1.1 on Solaris.  Our issues were resolved (by NetApp) and the following findings made:

DAR (Direct Access Restore)
===========================

DAR is limited to 1024 files.  If you try and recover more than 1024 files the restore
will complete without error but only 1024 files will be recovered.  This is in my opinion
a Networker bug.  Could also find no documentation about this1024 files limit.

DAR is best used for recovering a few files from a large save set.  When trying to
recover hundreds of files the recover rate is very slow.

In order to use nwrecover for recovering many files you must take out the line
"DIRECT=y" in client setup.  The restore will parse the whole saveset.  Once finished,
remember to put DIRECT=y back again.
 

Recovering files past the browse policy
=======================================
Our browse policy is set to 3 months but the media database is retained for 15 years.
In order to recover files over 3 months old run the following command to get the save
set information.

% mminfo -aV -c netapp     (where netapp is the client name)

NetApp1Full.001     netapp      29 GB  full /vol/unix
 1351792385  1011913207 01/24/02 11:00:07 PM 04/27/02 01/24/17
          0 30445916163   3    0 1351780097 30445916164 cbN

Load the tape manually and fast forward to the right place on the tape.  In the example
above the command would be  mt -f nrst1a fsf 3   (where nrst1a is the device name)
View the contents of the backup with
% restore tbf 60 nrst1a

To restore to a specific location use the following (rewind and fsf if you ran a restore
tbf first)
% restore xbfD 60 nrst1a /vol/destination /vol/unix/file_to_recover

If you don't specify a restore location it will go to /vol/vol0.
Note, 60 is the block size which Networker defaults to.

best regards

Matt Musgrove
Thales