If you buy a newer Mac laptop that comes preloaded with the new OS X Lion, it won't come with any recovery discs. There is now a hidden, protected partition on the laptop's hard drive that can be booted into by holding down "Option" during start up. It will help you in restoration. You can either use it to attempt repair of your drive's existing files, or it will help you "nuke and repave" (wipe all and reinstall everything).
So my next question was, does Apple have or allow a "burn your own recovery discs" feature like other companies provide?
Well, check out this: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433
Apple has released an app that you can download (free), which can turn any USB-connected drive (such as, for instance, a USB thumbdrive) into an external emergency recovery partition.
According to the Apple website:
Built right into OS X Lion, Lion Recovery lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.
Note: In order to create an external Lion Recovery using the Lion Recovery Assistant, the Mac must have an existing Recovery HD.
I downloaded it, and succeeded while using a meager 2GB thumbdrive! Obviously, the folks at Apple put some thought into how small of a drive they would support. I am amazed they decided to support drives as small as 2GB. Either they did some awfully tight compression, or they limited how much gets included in the recovery. For example, new Macs come with not only OS X Lion, but also iLife. Are they squeezing both onto that 2GB thumbdrive?
That question led me to reinsert the thumbdrive. Previously, before I had ejected it after it was first made, it showed up in the Finder as a disk image with an App file on it. When I resinserted it to check it more carefully, nothing at all shows up in Finder. Hmm. I had a memory come to mind of a character from the Lord of the Rings movies saying (about the ring), "Keep it secret. Keep it safe." Oh, well. I'm not willing to attempt a dry run of restoring, just to find out what it does.
It seems like a wise precaution to visit the link, download the free assistant, and make your own emergency recovery drive. Why? If your hard drive suffers a melt-down that is merely file related, then your hidden recovery partition will be fine. But if it suffers full blown mechanical failure, then you could easily find yourself unable to access anything at all on the drive. If you wind up having to buy and install a new drive (and you're no longer under Apple Care) it would really help you to have this emergency drive. It takes only moments to download and create yours, and 2GB thumbdrives are dirt cheap.
In a somewhat-related vein, remember that if you bought a downloadable copy of OS X Lion ($29.99), there is a process by which you can legally burn an installation DVD of it. I know it works, because I have done it.
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