How do I do disaster recovery in Lion?
 

Fortunately, I'm not actually trying to recover from a disaster, I'm just making sure I'm in place to be able to do so. I've used SD in the past in prior OSs to perform such a recovery and it worked beautifully. Boot to the cloned drive, then erase and restore to the computer I'm trying to revive.

But with Lion's funkiness, is that still the method? I went and looked at the user guide and it doesn't appear to have been updated for Lion. So I just want to make sure I'm very clear on precisely what I need to be able to recover in Lion.

Currently, I make a bootable cloned backup of my computer to an external hard drive partition once a week using smart update. So if my hard drive were to fail on my laptop, how would I go about restoring from my external hard drive given I'm running Lion now?

I apologize if this is documented elsewhere. I looked through all the forum topics and didn't see it addressed, and as I said above, checked the user guide as well. Sorry if I'm being dense.

Same way as always. Boot from the backup, restore with "Restore - all files" and "Smart Update".

Thanks for the quick reply, Dave.

So the hidden recovery partition in Lion is not a factor here? Seems like that would be missing on the restored drive, no?

If it's not missing, then how does it get there?

If it is missing, what does that mean? Don't I need it there for some purpose?

It's on the original drive. If you deleted it, you can recreate it by reinstalling Lion from the App Store (which will leave your data in place and refresh the OS).

Thanks Dave.

Let me recap what I think you're telling me to be sure I'm clear.

My laptop takes a dive. Something happens and now it won't boot. Let's say the hard drive failed. So now I've lost access to everything on it, including the recovery drive. I replace the hard drive and then......

I plug in the USB cable to my external hard drive and boot to my SuperDuper cloned backup. It comes up just like it would've in Snow Leopard.

I do the restore from the backup to the new, blank hard drive on my laptop. I'm now up and running and the lack of a recovery partition is utterly transparent, it doesn't impact anything I can see. But to complete the process, I reinstall Lion and now I have a fresh OS and the data files I just restored remain intact. I'm good to go.

Do I have it? Thanks again for your help.

Yep - although a new drive has to be partitioned as always (see Help > Frequently Asked Questions, top question).

Thanks so much Dave.