Can Time Machine restore to a new internal HDD?

hi all, i've got a 1tb external drive that's exclusively used by Time Machine. the 1tb drive is connected to my 500gb mac mini. i've been running time machine for 6 months now daily, i just wanted to know if it was backing up everything on my 500gb drive or not. how can i check that it's working properly?
also, does anyone know how i'd go about restoring my mac mini in case i had to replace the 500gb hdd? can time machine restore everything if i needed it to? if i bought a new HDD tomorrow for example, how could i get my system running back to where it was running today with all of the current settings and files etc?  is there any way for me to check that Time Machine will actually restore OS X, all my videos, music and my work should the HDD actually die?
is there an apple link i can read?
thanks for any help.

To answer your question about replacing a hard drive and recovering what was on your old one ...
Yes, Time Machine was designed for that. You may have one of two scenarios:
(1) Your hard drive is replaced by the Apple Store or another Apple repair shop, in which case they usually restore it with the operating system you had before and configure it so it has a new system with no users set up; the first time it starts up it runs Setup Assistant. When Setup Assistant runs, you select the option to restore from a Time Machine backup. It will then automatically restore your entire hard drive to the newly installed one. Everything will be just as it was with the old drive. Exceptions: you MAY have to enter user keys for software like MS-Office and Adobe Photoshop. and you MAY have to reinstall your printers and scanners.
(2) If the hard drive is replaced but no operating system or anything is put on it, you need to boot from your Install-OS-DVD and install a new operating system on the new drive. Then, on the first reboot, Setup Assistant runs and you can follow the instructions from (1) above.
A good informational site about Time Machine is here: http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
How do you know that your Time Machine backup is a good one? You can peruse through all the backups by running Time Machine and manually inspect that the files in those key folders (photos, music etc.) are all there and have the right sizes. You can "test recover" selected folders to a scratch location just to check that it works. I suggest you obtain another external drive and use it to make a "clone" of your internal drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. This is like a second backup, a failsafe in case, say, your Time Machine drive were to fail. This is not unheard of, since a power failure could cause both your internal drive and Time Machine drives to crash at the same time. The "clone" should be unplugged and stored separately to avoid this issue. You can update the clone, say once a week or once a month.

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