Are Time Machines backups of bootable backups of the OS? Reading online people say it's not.. but I remember it being offered recently from Migration tool (which I did not choose), which would make it seem then it's a bootable copy.
Time Machine backups
ARE NOT BOOTABLE however you can boot from a Recovery drive and then restore from a Time Machine backup. It is too long a story to go into the reasons, but I did exactly that at least three times in the last week and it always worked perfectly.
So if my Mac HD fried, and I cloned back from a SD clone, the recovery drive is not there, fine. But could I then add the recovery drive to the OS, manually and stay with what I have or do I have wipe Mac HD clean to get it as a feature? i.e. putting back in all my apps manually one at a time..?? That is the confusing part.
First the recovery Drive is not part of the OS but it is installed by the OS X installer in a separate invisible volume on your boot drive. If the volume structure on the boot volume got damaged you could still boot from the Recover drive and run Disk Utility, OS X install, or Recover from a Time Machine backup. If your HD mechanism fried it would take the Recovery Drive with it. You would have to install a replacement HD, boot an internet version of Recovery Drive (handily provided by Apple) or a Recovery drive on a different drive and install the latest version of OS X which would create a new recovery drive on your new HD in the process. Then you could run migration assistant to recover your files, settings, applications, etc from either a clone or a Time Machine Backup.
