The Apple Beat: OS X's disc free OS recovery is rock solid

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

I recently had to rescue my wife's ageing first-generation MacBook Air from what looked like impending disk failure. We decided to move her system files to a newer machine with more updated hardware and a biggler hard drive. Then I realized I no longer had the installer disks that came with the devices.

After a brief moment of panic, I remembered that Apple hasn't been including installer disks for the past few years and that any system restoration could be done via OS X Recovery or via  the cloud. I'm old school in the sense that I've always felt the need to have backup copies of operating systems for computers I use. Specially since in the past, these have been useful to boot from in order to repair or reinstall troubled computers.

Apple's system no longer requires physical media such as DVDs or USB thumbdrives. If you're running Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks, you can restore your device right from the cloud. This enabled me to take an newer MacBook Air, restore it and get it ready for the transfer.

On the older Air, I simply backed up the entire contents of the drive via Time Machine to a new 2 Terabyte Western Digital My Passport Ultra external drive. 

Once this was backed up on to the external drive, getting the newer MacBook Air to take all the information, files, apps and settings from the older machine was extremely easy (although it took around five hours since the newer MacBook Air only has a USB 2.0 interface, even if the external drive was USB 3.0.

All in all, the eperience was straightforward and pain-free. Best of all, no need for discs or disc drives or any thumbdrives.

Once the transfer to the new MacBook Air was completed, it still needs to index all the new files properly (this takes a couple of hours) and then we ran Software Update to ensure all the latest firmware is installed. I usually make sure everything is in order by running disk utility and repairing permissions. That's it, done, voila!

This whole experience just shows how effective and powerful Apple's recovery tools are as well as how evolved the cloud component and back up tools like Time Machine can be if used properly.