RE: Flash drives. While it is possible to have a bootable coy of an OS on a flash drive, if you don't mind waiting five or ten minutes to boot up and every thing running as if it were in a jar of molasses stored in a refrigerator. They are totally inappropriate for Time Machine backups not only because they are painfully slow but they lack the capacity for the job. To top everything else off, they do not simplify the job.
External hard drives are cheap and easy to use if you do not over complicate things with multiple partitions and/or volumes.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
