I started playing with USB's a couple of weeks ago in I suppose an unconventional way.
I used saline-backup to clone my running OS on my hdd to a usb and put grub on the usb's mbr but if I F12 and select the usb it don't boot from it, I've tried with fat32 and ext4 but I'm one of life's losers, I was born a male after all, I guess I should read about it but that irritates me that I have to for something so simple.
If I boot to my hdd and update grub it will then appear in the grub menu and I can boot into it and it has persistance and I can put it in any other machine and clone it to the hdd so it seems to me to be a good way of using usb's, I've tweaked the script so it auto creates the data folder that got excluded and I added a line to where it creates the new fstab so when I boot from the clone everything works with mounting my data partition and symlinks.
I can install my os onto a usb3 in 10 minutes so it's a good backup shall we say to do before an upgrade, if the upgrade borks you just clone the usb back or get your work done on the usb, your never stuck with nothing to boot into toothandnail and it works on stable or the new Jessie that's due out, a very useful tool.
off topic but
Question
What is 14.04 based on, is it a snapshot of Debian that's taken roughly 6-9 months before debian testing goes into the freeze period for the next stable which I would think would be bad time to take a snapshot.
Also if the new debian stable comes out 12 months after the LTS which OS is the most up to date?
What you lose are PPA's but if I was in business I would be running my licenced copies of XP and office in a virtual machine and taking regular snapshots of the virtual machine, using tools I'm already familiar with., said the old fool.
Why do I bother, young folk never listed they know best