Bootable flash drive

Following the advice in one my other threads, I have bought an external hard drive and after a bit of fiddling, managed to get Time Machine backup on it. Now I am trying to complete the other bit of the advice, which is to create a bootable flash drive. I have looked at the instruction on one of the websites and it says I should find the installer in Finder - Apps but it is not there. The flash drive is showing up on the desktop. Just wondering if there are any simple instructions anywhere please? My laptop is a Macbook Pro 15.4" running Mavericks and I purchased it about three weeks ago.
Thank you.

It would help if you linked to the instructions you're trying to follow.

Have you re-downloaded Mavericks installer since installing it on your Mac?

Yes, I should have linked the instructions. I'm using this one and have downloaded the recovery assistant. When I click on the icon it is detecting the flash drive. However, it is saying that it is for Lion and there is a Lion picture on it. Anyway, have assumed that this is OK for Mavericks and it has created it. The flash is now named 'Recovery Disk Assistant'. Please could you let me know if this is OK and if not, I can do it again.

When you install OSX from the app store it deletes the installer once it completes successfully.

It's that installer file you are failing to find, because it's been deleted.

The instructions fail to point out the most important point, you need that file.

Open the Mac App Store and go to purchased, you can re-download the Mavericks installer from here (if it says downloaded or installed just hold down option and click it). Cancel the install if it starts automatically.
You will now the file you need to follow the instructions.

Oh dear - done it wrong by the sound of it. Will have another go following your instructions later today. Thank you for putting me right.

I don't think you've done anything wrong. The instructions are just not great

Just checked and there is no reference to purchasing Mavericks in the App Store so I presume I will need to download somewhere else? When I just plugged the flash drive in it is not showing up on the desk top but I can find it in disk utility so should I erase it from there before I try again? Getting a bit muddled.

How did you buy and install mavericks?

Let's back up for a minute. While having a bootable flash drive is a nice little luxury, it isn't actually needed. You have both a recovery partition already on your boot drive if you should, for some strange reason, ever need to reinstall the system (very unlikely to ever occur, incidentally), and you have Internet-based Recovery should the hard drive utterly fail (a bit more likely, but still unusual) -- as flash drives are only slightly faster than the Internet download I've yet to see the reason to make one, apart from perhaps boredom on a rainy afternoon.

The procedure is not terribly complicated to make one, just not strictly necessary.

mrplow - Mavericks was installed on the machine - I've only had it for three weeks.
Chas_m - thank you for that information. As you can tell, there is so much I don't understand about this Mac. The flash drive was quite cheap so if you think that I don't need to bother I can use it for something else. It is just that I think someone mentioned it in one of my other threads and I am keen to do things properly. I suppose the other thing to consider is that yesterday I registered AppleCare so if I had any problems I could just contact them - well, for the next three years that is.

While having a bootable flash drive is a nice little luxury, it isn't actually needed.

Click to expand...

I actually agree with member chas_m on this. To my way of thinking, it's a waste of time to create a bootable flash drive when I have a bootable clone of my hard drive made with CCC. Of course like any other backup it has to be kept up to date.

Apologies. Read your original post as having mavericks for three weeks, not the machine itself. Doh!

No problem. I had a good browse of the App Store yesterday and found where Mavericks can be downloaded from but scotched the idea of the boot flash drive for now. It's not bad because I have completed all the other tasks that I set myself. Got the new external drive sorted and now have a Time Machine backup. Registered AppleCare and have bought the clear shell cover to protect the Macbook so three out of four isn't too bad.

@chscag - I assume that ccc is a third party application for backup? I've used Time Machine. Does this make a difference?

CCC is a reference to the third-party app Carbon Copy Cloner. It can also be used to back up your data.

There are a coupke of differences between Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner but the biggest difference is Carbon Copy Cloner can produce a "bootable" clone. In the even of a failure on your main drive you can reboot using the bootable clone and restore things from there. A time Machine backup is not directly bootable. You must either boot from the recovery partition or reinstall the OS first then restore files.

Many of our members use a combination of the two programs in their backup plan. They really have different goals. Time Machine is a continually updated "archive" of the system. You can choose to restore to a specific point int time. Carbon Copy Cloner restores to the last point where a "clone" was made.