The digital distribution model seems to be the way to move forward for software companies, but it is always good to have a physical copy of your software somewhere, just in case something untoward happens such as a hard drive failure that takes down Lion’s recovery partition along with it. For those who live life carefully, planning each and every single step, this should come across as no worry since you would have rolled your own install image, returning to the clutches of Snow Leopard before going ahead to go through the arduos OS X Lion installation process again.
Well, Apple knows that not everyone is like that – hence the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant being made available to the masses. This is a utility which essentially duplicates the OS’s recovery partition, where you will stash that image onto an external drive of your choice. To put it in a nutshell, even if your hard drive is damaged beyond repair, you can still boot straight into an installer with a new hard drive installed already. As long as there is more than 1GB of storage space, you are good to go.