Installing mavericks from a pen drive

Hi, I've recently installed an SSD drive on my late-2008 MacBook Pro, running Mountain Lion... and I'd like to install Mavericks, instead of jumping directly to Yosemite, at least for a while.
A friend of mine gave me a bootable pen drive and... ehm... I kinda need a little help, since I've never done it!
I remember I have to restart the machine, with the flash drive plugged in, and hold down the Option key until the boot menu is shown.
What I want to know is... can I do an upgrade, maintaining all my settings, programs, data, etc... or is it only possible to do a clean installation that will wipe away everything? (I do have a backup, done with carbon copy cloner, but still...)

Thanks fon any help you can give me!

A'

Weaselboy said:

Just follow the prompts to install and it will do an upgrade install without wiping any of your data. To wipe data you would need to start Disk Utility from the installer and erase the drive. As long as you don't do that, you will be fine.

Click to expand...

Aaah, so I remembered correctly, thanks! I kinda recalled something along the lines of what you've just said, but I really wasn't sure!

Cheers!