What happened to my OSX Recovery disk?

I have a 2TB external drive divided up into several 320G partitions, 320G being the size of my Macintosh HD disk in my Mac mini.  I periodically SuperDupe an image to one of these partitions and boot from it to guarantee I can still operate if my internal hard disk fails.
So, when I went to install Mavericks, I first SuperDuped my ML image to its external drive partition, then did a clean install of Mavericks on the internal hard drive.  When I was done, I SuperDuped Mavericks out to an ​available external disk partition, and SuperDuped my ML image back to the internal hard drive.  Now I have my ML  OSX bootable on my internal hard drive, and my new Mavericks OSX bootable on my external partition. 
But, what would have happened to my OSX Recovery Disk partition in this case?  I would have thought it would have gotten copied to my external drive when I SuperDuped it, but when I attempted to restart using Command-R, it went to Internet Recovery, which is what it does if you don't have an OSX Recovery Disk.
So, I'm confused.  Where is it?  Or, is it anywhere?  Can I recreate it once I permanently port Mavericks to my internal hard drive?

That's what I thought.  Now, if the Startup Disk is set to the external drive, and I restart using Command-R, where is it going to look for the recovery partition?  On the external drive?  Or on the internal drive?  The Recovery partition may have in fact been created on the internal hard drive, but if I didn't tell the Mac to boot from it, then I wonder if it would even look there.
Technically, as long as I have an external drive with a bootable Mavericks image, I don't need a recovery partition, because if the internal hard drive fails, then I can use the Option key at restart to select an alternate boot volume and use that to effect whatever recovery I may be able to achieve with Time Machine.
I work in disaster recovery, and have a Mac Pro G5 which used to be my primary system, and it had two internal hard drives.  When I migrated to the Mac mini, which only has one hard disk, I refused to cut over to it until I had a bootable external disk solution in place.  Belt and suspenders ...

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