I didn't recall seeing this mentioned anywhere so I thought I would point it out.
Most are aware of Lion's hidden recovery partition that is created on the same drive as your boot drive when you install Lion. A few web sites have published ways to duplicate or expose the partition for back up purposes. However Apple has made available the "Lion Recovery Disk Assistant" that lets you create the recovery disk on an external drive.
From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848
Quote:
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. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.
The actual download is here http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433
-Keith
