I'd consider moving onto a newer version of Ubuntu than 9.10.

Oh, OK. Let me fix that.

I made a USB stick version of Ubuntu 10.4 I use at work and
on the road, and it works a treat. I've got it all set up to
do all the "stuff" I need, and it's a very useful tool for me.

What I'd like to do is make another stick just like it. It would
be relatively painful to start with a fresh install and recreate
a second one but if I could just copy or mirror the one I have
that'd be perfect.

I've used dd to create image and iso files, would that work
with a removable drive? That would take care of any manual
partitioning or installation issues, albiet a bit time consuming.
But this isn't mass production so if it took a few hours that'd
be OK.

Just wondering if there's a "better" way to copy this USB stick.

A usb based distro is just made of files. As long as you have the same
format and copy all of the files including hidden files then there should be
no problem just doing a file copy with Nautilus. The usb keys can even be of
different size. I have done this in the past and it worked for me.

I'm rounding up a few different USB sticks and will
try a straight copy.

Looking at the existing one with GParted I may need to pre-format
the target sticks with the appropriate flags but that's no big deal.

We'll try it a few different ways and see how it goes.

Using dd is the best way provided the USB flash drives are partitioned the same
(flags and all, and the same size).

Copying will not work for bootable flash drives, so best to stick to dd which if
the flash drives are physically the same size should be just like what we called
"blasting" a hard drive which is to take a master drive and duplicate it at the
block level of the hard drive (which in the past had typically been in terms of
512 byte blocks for hard drives - and is no longer the case).

Is the program actually dd or is that an abreviation of another name or is dd an
option of some command?

Yes, the name of the program is dd, so be sure to read the man page with the
command: $ man dd - where $ is the prompt, not a part of the command that
follows.