Reader Larry wrote me regarding his new Asus machine, which came without any kind of recovery disks (which would be used to restore Windows in the event of a major system meltdown). That’s not ...

[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion (OS X 10.7). We also have a complete guide to installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).] ...

The latest installment in the story of how bootable Mac backups will eventually disappear started with a blog post by Shirt Pocket Software’s Dave Nanian. In it, he explained why SuperDuper could no ...

Mavericks (OS X 10.9) doesn’t ship on a disc. Instead, it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t ...

SD cards have been a ubiquitous part of our tech lives for going on 25 years now, having replaced older formats like MultiMediaCard. While our phones have mostly jumped off the microSD train in favor ...

There are tons of awesome live, bootable Linux systems, but what if you need to run OS X? Reader Will shows us how to put a portable version of OS X on a thumb drive and boot it on (most) Intel ...

Bootable disc image files may contain all the data necessary to create a disc from which computers can boot, but if you want them to work, you can't just burn them to a disc the way you would regular ...

Want to try or install a Linux distribution (distro) on your computer? Making a bootable flash drive with an image of the distro is the simplest route these days. I've done it dozens of times, and ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

Flash drives are convenient for making backups of files as well as copying data from one computer to another. These small memory devices are portable and only require ...