Can a bootable USB drive store media files (videos, images, etc,) along with a bootable image? Can we use the bootable USB drive as a storage device?
Yes, a bootable USB could be repurposed as a storage device although milage may vary based on the nature of the distribution installed on the bootable usb drive (for example balenaOS has a FAT32 boot partition that is easy to manipulate to add files to, etc). It’s not best practice and not recommended either as doing it could lead to unexpected behavior. Some distros (debian and derivates for example) allow for the usb drive to have “persistant storage” for that purpose via mkusb which could be something to check out.