1. A method comprising: managing a primary storage facility in a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system; relocating data from the primary storage facility to a secondary storage facility in the HSM system; receiving, by the primary storage facility, a request from a client for only a portion of the relocated data, the portion comprising less than the entire relocated data; and responding to the request by obtaining, by the primary storage facility, only the requested portion of the relocated data from the secondary storage facility, wherein a non-requested portion of the relocated data remains in the secondary storage facility, allocating a sparse file on disk in the primary storage facility in response to obtaining the requested portion of the relocated data, storing the requested portion of the relocated data in the primary storage facility in the sparse file, and providing the requested portion of the relocated data to the client from the sparse file.