Hm, I don't know If you can boot from a timemachine backup, but I doubt it.. What I've done is simply clone from HDD to SSD with carbon copy cloner and changed the boot drive to the SSD, on the next startup your mac will boot from the SSD
I've bought stickers to change from qwerty to azerty, it's as expensive for a whole keyboard as one new key... You can also buy a silicon overlay, also cheaper than buying nes keys