Anyone out there have any experience with Unison to sync two Macs? Does it handle HFS+ metadata properly?

For a while, I was na?vely using rsync over a USB drive to sync my iBook and iMac... Until someone reminded me that rsync doesn't preserve resource forks and thus has the potential to corrupt backups. From what I've garnered online, there's some confusion as to whether the 10.4 update to rsync actually does the job. I haven't had any problems yet, but I don't want to keep tempting fate. If I've toasted my files already, so be it... I think rsync has gotten its sticky fingers on most of them by this point.

Forgive the naive question, but how important are resource forks anyway? Most of the files I'm backing up are either text files or else files with major, well-known extensions (.jpg, .xls, .ppt, .doc). [I know, I know. I'm slowly weaning myself from Microsoft. Hey, I'm even learning LaTeX.]

I guess what I'm trying to ask is this: those files would work just as well if transferred to a Windows machine - so the HFS+ metadata on them can't be that important, can it? I have no worries about the txt files, but what types of files would be ruined with rsync? Mac only files produced by OmniOutliner and DevonThink? System stuff? Applications? By the way, I don't use the comments field to tag my files, so I'm not worried about losing self-generated metadata.

I like Mac OS X for a lot of reasons, but its half-baked, cobbled together file system--an instance of weird Mac parochialism--is not one of them...