Thanks Honestone/ Joe, great info.
Interesting. I never thought of using TM before as an OS backup, but if my Mac HD went sour, but was still working, you would then erase it, from the recovery drive, and then use migration assistant and bring in the last copy of the Mac HD from TM, correct flow chart?
And if the HD needed to be replaced, ( I just hired someone to put a new SSD in my laptop 2 weeks ago).. they put in a new OS, and then I did a migration from the old hardrive, but if the hardrive was fried, I would migrate from TM as well. If TM was fried for some reason or did not have recent Mac HD backups for a long time for some reason, then I would migrate from the SD clone, treating it as the "new computer", and then be able to get the recovery partition later installed by the 3rd party links listed above?
This is nice, in the past I just used TM in a limited way as I only had a 700 GB external, and exuded so much including the OS. But in this latest overhaul, I bought a new 8TB drive to replace that which has everything covered, so for first time I'll think of TM , and not SD as the emergency go to replacement for the fried Mac HD, right? not the SD external.
I'm open to CCC, but have been with SD for a long time and am ok with it.
How do you all even know that SD did not do the recovery partition? I guess I don't read the forums here enough, just out of the loop, is some newsletter you all get to let you know about these arcane things?
But this is a nice mind shifter about TM.
First, I had previously read about SD not backing up/cloning the Recovery HD partition, but that Carbon Copy Cloner did. Also, when I have needed to do a restore from the SD clone, I could see that the Recovery HD partition was not there.
Secondly, if one really needs the Recovery HD partition, and have it restored "automatically", then Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to go. On the other had, I myself would not need to rely on the Recovery HD partition, as 1) I have the superior disk cleanup/maintenance/repair products Tech Tool Pro and Disk Warrior, 2) I have the "Install OS X El Capitan" in at least two places on my system (and thus on my backup/clone), and 3) I can easily re-create the Recovery HD partition using the utility Recovery Partition Creator.
Third, I insure that my system (on both machines) is "lean and clean", and thus tend to rarely have issues. Of course, no matter how much care one takes for any drive (internal or external, SSD or HDD), they will eventually go bad. But, one can get prepared for that.
