Can you use Time Machine to shuttle data via a USB stick? How well does it work when you have more than two drives that you want to keep mostly synchronized?
Time Machine does the one thing it does really well, which is incremental, local (or network-local) backups and easy restores.
It's not for snapshotting or mirroring. I used to use CarbonCopyCloner to clone my boot drive to an external USB drive every morning at ~4am, so if the internal drive on my iMac died I had an immediate bootable replacement.
(And when the internal drive DID die, I just rebooted the machine and took nearly a year to get around to replacing the internal drive!)
