In my recent review of the 2011 Macbook Air, I noticed that Apple no longer included a recovery disk (no CD or USB drive) in the box, since it’s already built into the Mac OS X Lion. Still, it would have been nice to have the same feature found on an external drive.
Some folks were actually making hacks to do this since last week. Yesterday, Apple finally released the official tool.
You can download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant here (1.07MB).
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.
You will also need a USB flash drive with at least 1GB of free space to use as the external recovery disk.
Installation is pretty quick and straight-forward, took me under 5 minutes to create the Recovery Disk.
It lessen the burden in restoration.