Query about staging area for grt restore

Hi 

I have been reading various discussions on the forum and articles about BE 2012 requiring staging area (default c:\temp) on the media server while restoring file/folder from vmdk backup. 

Assuming my VM is 100GB and the file i want to restore is only 1MB, what i read is i need 100gb space on BE server. Does this mean that 100GB data is going to be copied from tape to disk just to recover 1MB ?

Thanks