How does Disk Uitility's Restore actually work?

[Cox Orange]

I googled for it and all results were about iphone, ipod and iTunes backup and restore. I find this is really telling about the era of Macs we're in now. Excluding the i-words, does not help either. I hoped that at least Apple Support Page would give me results (I remembered, that there once was a document explaining what the difference between OS 9 installation and restore disks is...), but nothing.

To the point:
Does it just overwrite everything and literally do a clean install (which would make no difference to just installing after wiping the HD)?

I would normally just copy my back up (with SuperDuper) or drag and drop folders, but I was wondering, if it was possible to install a fresh OS, run updates and then use the restore DVD to just fit in the missing files and prefs from my backup to the internal disk.

Background is: I do want to save time, not having to install third party plugins and software again and alter the preference settings. Plus, I would like to have everything assorted un-chunked, more precisely than OS X does it self by self-defragmenting and not having to use a third party defrag tool. I installed a bigger hard drive as well.

Though not really helping but interesting for maintenance: http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#3

 

[apunkrockmonk]

Disk Utility's restore function is used to restore a drive from a disk image.

For example, I have an 8GB USB flash drive, formatted FAT, with data on it. I need to use this Flash drive for something else but afterwards I want it to be identical to how it was before.

I can create a disk image from the flash drive and later restore that disk image back to the flash drive (after image scanning it) and it will be like nothing ever happened.

Even if I format it HFS+, when I restore the drive back from the image it will return back to FAT or whatever the original file system was.

The functionality you're seeking is not provided by Disk Utility's Restore function.

 

[Cox Orange]

So "restore" is pretty much useless, because it does the same as just copying a backup from one to the other disk.