Advice for upgrading and new hard drive installation

[Shannon5000]

I've been running 14.04 on my HP p7-1455 machine for a while and need to replace new hard drive. I would also like to update ubuntu from 14.04 to 16.04. I have my current (14.04) system backed up and ready to go. What would be the best way to approach this, upgrade and then replace the hard drive, or replace the hard drive, restore from backup, and then upgrade? Or some other option that I'm unaware of!

[grahammechanical]

What have you backed up? The documents & data? Or the complete hard drive? Or selected partitions on the hard drive? If it is only documents & data I would put in the new hard drive and do a fresh install and then move the documents and data on to the new drive. But that advice is not appropriate if the backup is a clone of the hard drive. Regards.

[Shannon5000]

I have a cloned backup of my current hard drive.