cwa, the thread responses took me away from my simple thinking (clone drive) I have no desire to do anything over the minimum
. I was looking for some "expert" confirmation that my bootable cloned drive (done) plus time machine files were a good way to go; think you just confirmed that above.
The earlier posts in the thread re the ability to dl the OS was something I was unaware of anyway so; learned a little
Thanks
Phew!!
OK, so saying that you're "WAY overthinking this", was probably uncalled for, having just re-read the thread. I apologize.
Just to sum up, you've got a few different options for recovery in the event of a catastrophic failure. I don't think one way is necessarily better than another, they will all be equally useful (though they may take varying amounts of time)...
1) Recover the system by downloading the OS over the Internet via the Recovery options in EFI (longest amount of time). Then restore the data through a Time Machine or bootable clone (like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner).
2) Boot the machine from a bootable clone external and then clone the disk back to the new internal HDD.
3) Create a bootable flash drive with OS X and keep this handy as a "System Disc" of sorts. Boot the machine from that drive and then recover the data from your Time Machine backup.
Hope that makes it more clear.