Ways of cloning a USB key without use of dd?

Question

I am trying to clone a bootable USB key. Obviously dd would to the trick nicely, but since the actual size of the files on my drive is ~15MB I end up waiting for a bunch of minutes while dd copies empty blocks to my 4GB USB key.

Is anyone aware of a solution that does this nicely (e.g., copy all files, clone MBR) without the wait of copying empty blocks?

Answer 1

dd takes a -count command line that lets you specify how many blocks to copy. http://linux.die.net/man/1/dd