If you have a recovery partition. Yeah.......if your internal HD is fried........time machine is useless.
A recovery partition isnt needed to boot from a clone.
Most Mac users I know could care less about the recovery partition, and the designer of SuperDuper himself has said he didnt create the ability to create a CLONE of the recovery partition into his software, since he never uses is nor anyone he knows.
all the HD upgrades Ive installed dont have recovery partitions, use the original HD as an emergency backup. And use TM as a working emergency backup.
In case of a HD crash, I can be back up in seconds with a HD clone, not so with TM.
Regardless of all of that, TM isnt meant to be a prosumer or professional storage device, not in intent nor are prosumers or professionals using it for that manner.
I have a TM backup of all of my Macs, but I would never consider in a million years in thinking of it as a data hub for my work.
Most pros vital data would NEVER fit on a single HD anyway, or any single HD / Time Machine.
Important data you âdonât dare loseâ should not be considered ultimately safe, or ideally stored (at the very least not as sole copy of same) on your Time Machine backup. Hourly and daily fluctuations of your system OS, applications, and software updates is the perfect focus for the simple user to conduct âclick it and forget itâ backups of the entire system and files on the Macbook HD.
Bootable clones are the choice of professionals and others in that Time Machine cannot be booted from and requires a working HD to retrieve data from (meaning another computer). Your vital data needs to be and should be âfrozenâ on some form of media storage, either in a clone, as an archived HD containing important files, or on DVD blank archival media.
TM is idealized as a system hub backup, not an archive or storage device of vital data.
No professional is using time machine to safeguard files, and priceless information.
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http://pondini.org/TM/Clones.html
TM Disadvantages
However, if you're running Lion 10.7.2 or above, and backing-up to a directly-connected external HD, there's probably a copy of your Recovery HD on the Time Machine drive, so if your internal HD fails, you can start from that.
Pondini Florida, USA
"That's why many of us keep both Time Machine backups and a bootable clone. Since all hardware fails, sooner or later, and no backup app is perfect, that gives you the best of both"
Time Machine not a true backup?Time Machine not a true backup?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4166707?tstart=0
Linc Davis
Yes, a local Time Machine backup volume will boot into Lion Recovery, provided that at least one of the source volumes backed up to it has a valid recovery partition under Mac OS 10.7.2 or later.
Booting into recovery is a world different than booting in 20 seconds from a CLONE to your desktop.
Also as Linc mentions above, if the SOURCE recovery partion isnt valid, its "no luck"