auto recovery?
 

My daughter's MBP had a disk crash, and fortunately, she did regular SD backups. I was going to walk her through recovery, by booting to the clone, and using SD to copy back to the (now blank) internal hard disk replacement. But when she booted, some resident utility asked if she wanted to "recover" using the backup disk. She said yes, and it did. Slam dunk, it would appear.

So I find it interesting that you don't need to use SD to recover using a SD clone. You just connect the backup disk, and the resident system utility just takes care of it. At least that's how she described it to me.

Did that really do a proper recovery?

Yep, that's fine: she did "internet recovery", which installs the OS, then copies from a backup, including SuperDuper. Perfect.

I was vaguely aware of internet recovery, but I had no idea that the system would then automatically copy from the SD backup after it did that. That makes restoring to a new, blank hard disk pretty much entirely painless. Very nice.