Weaselboy,
It has been a long time since I did all of this, and my memory seems not so great.
Not necessarily. I understand you started CCC and used the Disk Center in CCC to make a copy of the Recovery HD partition on your backup disk, but that is not necessary. If you just attach a blank drive of any kind and click clone, CCC will automatically see there is no copy of the Recovery HD partition on the destination drive and put one there on its own. So you normally never need to use the Disk Center like you did, although there is no harm in doing it that way.
As I recall, on a blank drive, CCC asks you if you want to create a Recovery HD partition, so I think the correct answer is a combination of what we are saying.
CCC will also automatically update changes to Recovery HD without using that Disk Center. As a matter of fact if you made that clone in June, and since updated to 10.8.5, and you do another clone today you can see in the CCC progress bar when the Recovery HD update form 10.8.5 is copied over.
Makes sense.
The built in CCC encryption makes an encrypted sparse bundle DMG on the destination and puts all cloned files inside that bundle. The size of the sparse bundle will grow and shrink depending on content size. Like I explained, this is done at the outset of the first clone, then automated in subsequent clones. The advantage to this approach is it only uses space equal to the size of the clone.
What I was concerned you had done was make a CCC clone then after that just right click the drive in Mountain Lion and click encrypt. That is a different process entirely and would turn the entire drive into a encrypted core storage volume like FV2 does. If you do that with a drive (not just a partition), I was concerned the Recovery HD partition would not be accessible.
I am editing this post because some of this is coming back to me now...
If I may be so bold to challenge someone who clearly knows more than I ever will, this is what I recall (now)...
Once the Recovery HD partition is created in CCC, it is hidden from CCC and Mountain Lion in the sense that when I used Mountain Lion to encrypt my thumb-drive, I'm pretty sure that I only encrypted the non-Recovery HD partition and not the entire physical thumb-drive.
Now, I could be way off on this, and relying on Debbie's memory from June is very unreliable, but that seems to me what happened. And I'm pretty sure that I had both a bootable Recovery HD partition and an encrypted bootable Main HDD partition on my thumb-drive.
Don't have my new MBP or said thumb-drive with me. (Why spend thousands of dollars on a new MBP and actually use it?!)
It sounds like you used the Encryption tab in CCC's Disk Center to encrypt the volume (partition) only and not the entire disk, which was my concern.
Don't recall why, but I DEFINITELY know that I used Mountain Lion to do the encryption because it offered some small thing over doing it in CCC.
This method of encryption turns the entire partition into a encrypted core storage volume, so that volume (partition) can't be used for anything else. You could work around this somewhat my limiting the size of the partition, then that of course may be subject to change in future backups.
There is a distinction between the two methods.
Again, as memory serves - or doesn't serve - me, I'm pretty sure that Mountain Lion can't see the Recovery HD partition after it is created, so you don't have to worry about encapsulating it in an encrypted container that would prevent you from using it.
(I'm sure I'm not describing things in the most eloquent way?!)
Anyways...
Next week I should have yet another Corsair thumb-drive, and time permitting, I will have to work through all of these scenarios we are discussing and see what the truth actually is.
This is a good discussion, and one on which I need to become an expert - and not forget - because having a clone that is either not bootable or a thumb-drive which leaves data that is not encrypted and thus exposes me to hackers would be really bad!!!
More on this next week...
Thanks,
Debbie