Make Separate Recovery Disks for Each of Your Macs

Make Separate Recovery Disks for Each of Your Macs

If you have multiple Macs, your inclination might be to make one Recovery USB stick, place it behind glass with a hammer attached by a chain, and use it in the event of an emergency with any of your Macs. That plan seems solid, but it might not work.

The general rule is that if you’ve upgraded your Mac to Lion or Mountain, and created the recovery disk on that machine, it will work on any other Mac you’ve upgraded in the same manner. So if you’ve got an iMac and a Mac-Book Pro that both shipped with Snow Leopard and you’ve upgraded both of them to Mountain Lion, the recovery disk you created on one machine will work on both of them.

But if the iMac has been upgraded to Mountain Lion and the MacBook is still using Lion, the recovery disk won’t work on both computers. Things get weirder if you have a Mac that came with Lion or Mountain Lion preinstalled. For such machines, only recovery disks made on the same machine you’re using them for will work. Want to use a USB recovery stick with your 2012 Retina MacBook Pro?

You’d better make sure you made it on that machine. The easiest solution? Just make one recovery disk for each computer, on each computer. Mark which one is which and hope you never need them.