[DM-MUG] pure speculation about future Lion installs

[Bailey Ford]

Hey DMMUGgers,

I had a weird thought about how it would work to restore a machine in several months when Lion has been updated a few times. I thought I would share my speculation with the group. If I'm wrong, you can all point and laugh. If I'm right, cow tow and praise my prognostication. Or not. Whatever. 

When you install Lion, you go to the App store, download a 3.7 GB installer file. When that is finished, you run the installer and it places a new partition on your main drive  that is called Recovery HD and asks you to restart. Your mac then boots from that Recovery partition and installs Lion. The nifty thing to notice here is that the Recovery partition does NOT contain a full copy of Lion. It uses data from the giant downloaded install file and then deletes that file. This pissed me off - I wanted to use that same installer on my other machine and not suffer through another download. Why would Apple do it like this?

If you use the Recovery HD and there is no installer file around, it will try to get all that data from the internet. The cool prognostication here is that we might get to install a fully updated version of the software instead of going through the pain of installing 10.x.0 and then downloading and installing all the updates. I think that would be cool. 

Any thoughts? Is this silly for some reason I have overlooked? 

cheers,
bailey