Can i reinstall OS X Mountain Lion from scratch from a Time Machine Backup

Can i reinstall OS X Mountain Lion from scratch from a Time Machine Backup
Asking because i'm a new mac user having used windows since 3.11, wanting to know if the Time Machine bacup was enough or will i need to make a seperate OS install disk or usb drive ???
thanx in advance guys

Lizardcarter's instructions are correct, you can (and possibly should) consider a second external HD to create a bootable clone. Redundancy in backups is a very good thing because backup can fail too. A bootable clone is an external HD that has a mirror of your internal HD so if the internal HD does crash you can boot from the clone, something that cannot be done from TM. This means you will be down for minutes and can resume work until you have had the internal HD replaced. Never use an external HD for both TM and a bootable clone, each should have it's own EHD. The reason being is if the EHD crashes you have lost ALL of your backup and are dead, don't laugh it happens! To create a bootable clone get either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (both about $30) and you're pretty set. Many people on these forums (including myself) use that strategy and yes I have had a backup fail.

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feinberj wrote:
I've got filevault turned on for my mac Mac Mini (10.6.2). I'm using Time Machine to back up to a firewire drive. There's plenty of space - my Mini hd has 250 Gb of 500 used, and I'm backing up to a 750Gb partition on the external drive. The initial backup went OK, and when I logged out it backed up my filevault-protected home directory. When I logged back in, I was able to browse the Backups.backupdb on the external drive, go to the users directory, and open the sparsebundle that was my filevault-protected home directory (after entering the password). I can browse through this backup of my home directory. However, when I try copying files from the backup of the home directory, I get an error:
The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in "(filename)" can't be read or written. (Error code -36).
I get this error for some files, but not all of them. I've tried running BatChmod to reset permissions on all files in my home directory, and then erasing the backup drive and having Time Machine recreate the backup. However I'm still having this problem.
I have also tried restoring the entire hard drive (to a 3rd external HD) by booting from the 10.6 DVD and going through the full-restore process. All of my files are fine when I restore using this method.
Is there something I should do so that I can restore individual files from the backup of my filevault sparsebundle?
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Can i reinstall OS X Mountain Lion from scratch from a Time Machine Backup

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