Time Machine questions

Hi guys, my name is ... and I'm a switcher

I have a couple of questions regarding Time Machine:

1. Is the backup such that if you needed to you could boot from the external Time Machine drive?

2. If you had to format and re-install the system drive to recover from a major failure, when you re-introduce the Time Machine drive would it recognize the different build and offer to restore your files, or would it play dumb and begin to overwrite the data with that from the newly installed system drive.

3. or is Time Machine designed to be supplementary to your existing backup measures?

I have used Carbon Clone Copier and love the simplicity, but I'm intrigued as to whether Time Machine will have the same all round backup features to complement it's automated data security.

Feed back / experience warmly welcome...

Mark

1. no
2. You can restore from a Time Machine backup.
3. yes and no, depends on what kind of backup you want.

I'd also recommend searching in the future. All these were answered recently in other threads.