General question - objectives of debian live.

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

I would just like a confirmation that I can use debian live to create a
portable clone of a subset of my regular debian environment that I can
carry around on a CD/DVD and a USB flash drive.

After reading the fine manual a couple of times, I'm pretty sure that's
what debian live proposes to do.

If so, and if I spend a couple of weeks with friends or family and have
access to a computer .. how would I sync back my home machine with the
live environment .. things such as mailboxes, development/documentation
directories .. possible changes to configuration files .. software that
I installed while away from home .. etc. 

Is this something I would have to keep track of and copy over manually,
or is there a tool that would do it automatically?

In a nutshell, the reason I started thinking about this in the first
place is that I was generally dissatisfied with rescue disks because
they presented me with an unfamiliar interface and I knew that I would
spend more time & energy fighting said interface and devising means to
work around its limitations than actually rescuing.

I first thought of choosing one particular rescue distribution and
remastering it .. and thought to myself .. that's going to be a lot of
work initially .. and more work down the line to keep that in sync with
my live environment.

Second thing I thought of was to use a debian system where I would have
applied whatever customizations to the interface that would give me the
basic look and feel of my system .. and make sure all my personal tools
and favorite applications were installed.

Then I started thinking .. wouldn't it be great if I could just clone my
environment at regular intervals via a semi-automatic procedure and
always have a bootable version of it on some media or other. 

Would save me a lot of work .. wouldn't risk leaving out anything .. and
if I ever needed a rescue system .. I would be at least one order of
magnitude more productive and considerably less likely to mess things up
than using something that basically reflects someone else's environment
and work habits.

That's when I started thinking that not only would this provide me with
the perfect rescue environment .. but I could also use it as a portable
version of my home system that I could carry in my pocket anywhere I go.

I'm planning on getting started on this next weekend .. so if anybody
has remarks about what I'm trying to do and warnings about about
possible restrictions or gotchas.. 

I would greatly appreciate.

Thanks,

CJ