Reusing workspaces

Our project has HUGE streams that produce workspaces that are like 3G. Working on a broadband connection it still take A LOT of time to create a workspace from a stream. There are times I'd like to have multiple workspaces to a stream to work on items that are totally unrelated. Is it possible to create a workspace from a stream while its fresh with no changes and just locally copy the whole directory tree and start using the new copy in jazz?

I've not explored this at all but was wondering if anyone knew off the bat the best way to do this and what issues I'm may see in trying to do this?
Once I did the local copy what would be the best way to important the new directory (workspace) back to Jazz? Would it know what stream it was associated with ?

Thanks !