While the new MacBook Airs that Apple released today were certainly a welcome sight, some users are disappointed that new MacBook Airs no longer include a recovery USB drive, but instead merely have a recovery partition. If you’re in that category, here’s how to make a restore drive of your own:
The process is pretty simple – just follow the steps below:
Creating A Physical Backup Of The OS X Lion Installer
- Download Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store as usual. Once you have it, open a Finder window, locate the OS X installation file that you just downloaded, right click (or option-click) on it, and select “Show Package Contents.”
- Within the contents of the package, you’ll see a “SharedSupport” folder. Open it. Inside that folder, you will find an image file called “InstallESD.dmg”. Copy this file to your desktop and mount it – this is the actual working image file that you can burn to a DVD, and clone to an SD card, USB thumb drive, or hard drive partition.
- Now, simply launch Disk Utility (located in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder). To copy to an SD card, flash drive, or hard drive partition (Make sure your destination has at least 5GB free), just option-click the volume inside of InstallESD.DMG, select “set as source”, click the “restore” tab in Disk Utility, drag the volume you want to copy it to into the “destination” field in the “restore” tab, make sure you select “erase destination”, and then click the “restore” button.
Voila! It is that simple, and now you can rest your mind, knowing that you have a hard physical backup of Lion that you can carry with you and use in emergencies. You can view the tutorial process in action by checking out the below YouTube video.
