[Angostura]

If you're on a newer Mac, there's no need any more - Internet Recovery installs the system onto a blank HD

[tunesmith]

I think the advantage of a bootable backup is that it is there, and you can just boot from it (or copy it to an external hard drive if it was on a remote volume). The point is that the backup was already in the right format. I think internet recovery is more about restoring from a time machine backup, which takes forever.

[ahknight]

Or restore the OS, download Arq, then restore from the Internet, which takes ten forevers. :)