[dnanian]

Ugh -- I composed a long reply to your previous post and now it's deleted, and I lost the text. Don't do that, joemac: you can simply EDIT your previous post.

To reiterate, less expansively this time:

- Yes, you'll hold down Option and start from the backup, or choose it in the Startup Disk preference pane.

- If you're running from the copy, you're running from the copy. Changes you make will modify the copy.

- An update takes various amounts of time given the system, number of files, changes, etc. I'd expect your case to take less than 20 minutes or so.

- More redundancy is better than less, so be as compulsive as you feel is necessary.

- System restore is, in general, not necessary on the Mac, because apps don't squirrel away tons of things in unexpected and problematic places. But we do have a feature called "Sandbox" that might prove helpful.

Hope that helps.