Are Time Machines backups of bootable backups of the OS? Reading online people say it's not.. but I remember it being offered recently from Migration tool (which I did not choose), which would make it seem then it's a bootable copy.
Time Machine backups
ARE NOT BOOTABLE however you can boot from a Recovery drive and then restore from a Time Machine backup. It is too long a story to go into the reasons, but I did exactly that at least three times in the last week and it always worked perfectly.
CORRECT! And, that is one of the disadvantages of Time Machine backups. With SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, one just needs to re-boot their Mac from either of those clones, and then do either a direct restore (each of those programs will first Erase (and Format?) the internal device, and then do the restore, or as I mentioned earlier, run Disk Utility from the clone to Erase and Format the internal drive, do a fresh, "virgin" installation of the OS (and making sure to get to the last used version on one's machine), boot the Mac from that freshly installed OS, and finally use Migration Assistant to "migrate"/copy stuff from the clone.
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So if my Mac HD fried, and I cloned back from a SD clone, the recovery drive is not there, fine. But could I then add the recovery drive to the OS, manually and stay with what I have or do I have wipe Mac HD clean to get it as a feature? i.e. putting back in all my apps manually one at a time..?? That is the confusing part.
First the recovery Drive is not part of the OS but it is installed by the OS X installer in a separate invisible volume on your boot drive. If the volume structure on the boot volume got damaged you could still boot from the Recover drive and run Disk Utility, OS X install, or Recover from a Time Machine backup. If your HD mechanism fried it would take the Recovery Drive with it. You would have to install a replacement HD, boot an internet version of Recovery Drive (handily provided by Apple) or a Recovery drive on a different drive and install the latest version of OS X which would create a new recovery drive on your new HD in the process. Then you could run migration assistant to recover your files, settings, applications, etc from either a clone or a Time Machine Backup.
Let me state again. There are two ways of getting the Recovery HD partition back:
1. Erase and Format the internal drive, and then do a fresh, "virgin" installation of the OS. The Recovery HD partition will get created as part of that installation.
2. With the restore from SuperDuper! already complete, and assuming you have the "Install OS X "whatever OS"" file someplace, use the utility I mentioned above, Recovery Partition Creator, to re-create the Recovery HD partition.
For #1, it will be necessary to use Migration Assistant to "migrate"/copy all the necessary stuff from the backup/clone. For #2, that stuff is already there via the Restore.
