Recommended USB Partition Setup

[DenverDave]

For those of us installing to a USB boot drive, a recommended USB partition setup - mount points - flags - would be helpful.

On my USB boot drive, I ended up with one Fat32 partition for the whole drive, no boot flags and told installer to boot boot grub everyplace it could think of.   Boot USB drive works well and is very fast to boot with Sparky 7 Mate on my older laptop.

Perhaps a wish list for my older, slower laptop with Windows hard disk unplugged to protect from me and unintentional Linux installs
- Probably the installer knows the USB source drive for the installation and likely only one other USB target drive plugged in and the installer might be able to tell if the target drive has been formatted before or contains info.
- knowing recommended place to put the boot info and file system type
- maybe having the Sparky system on a separate partition and recommended file type
- maybe have the home directory on a separate partition and recommended file type
- maybe a separate partition for other data to be shared in case above partitions are encrypted and maybe fat32 if Windows PC may need to read?

Currently to create a functional backup USB drive of my system I use the following dd command:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

The above command takes about an hour and a half to complete and I believe that most of the time is spent bare metal copying unused bytes.  Perhaps what needs to be copied with the dd command could be and rsync or copy could copy the files that are present.   Most of the size of my drive is not used.  Below sda is my Sparky7 Mate boot USB and sdb is my data USB - which I think indicates that most of the 1 1/2 hours spend cloning my Sparky boot USB is spent copying unused bytes?

ave@Sparky-Mate:~$ df /dev/sd*
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev             1922000       0   1922000   0% /dev
/dev/sda1       58822512 8911464  46890564  16% /
udev             1922000       0   1922000   0% /dev
/dev/sdb1       60058960 2796576  57262384   5% /media/dave/D720-DC3D
dave@Sparky-Mate:~$

- - thanks for Sparky7  !!!!  I figure saves me 40 hours of boot time a year over my old distro.