Backup-Scheme / Backup-Tools / Backup-Your Eyes Out I

I've trying to devise a clever plan for backing my stuff up and for a while it even worked. I had just gotten a new 1GB USB-Stick. It was quite a cool stick back then, even though it wasn't expensive or anything.

So i devised the following scheme. Whenever i plugged my stick into my pc or laptop a Backup Program should run and sync a certain directory on the PC with a certain directory on the Stick. It was a good plan ;)

If i just kept my working directories on the Computers inside the Sync Dir they would be in sync between the PCs i would be working on. When i was working on that i turned the Internet upside down for Backup Solutions. Some of the Links i stumbled upon can be found here: Backup in my del.icio.us (or if you have some problems with yahoo owning delicious and censoring china, photos in germany) backup in my ma.gnolia.

What did i need? I needed a portable solution for MS-Windows PCs as well as my Linux Laptops and Desktops. A graphical user interface was not really necessary. I just needed it to work not to display fancy, schmancy stuff. It should be free as in free software. Free as in ... and not as in. (Quoting RMS, yay)

First thing most of you familiar with the subject now probably have on their minds is also the first one i'm going to mention:

RSync (website HERE):

• A sneaky tool, using sneaky Algorithms
• very very Portable indeed. So running on all the required platforms would work just nicely
  
• been around quite a while
• lots and lots of nice options
• unfortunately the one i would need i missing: 2 way Sync

So where to look next? I found Unison

Unison (website HERE)

• neither as sneaky nor as portable as rsync, yet it does still work on all the platforms i need
• i managed to get it to work quite easily (for those of you who like GUIs there is even one of those)
• it is awfully slow, when i plugged in my stick i couldn't do anything because it took a long time comparing
• even though it should be easy to resolve conflicts his behavious sometimes was weird when trying to solve conflicts (just exiting, using neither file)
  

so, i have a setup for this. I just hardly use it. It is not convenient. I have to wait, and then it'll use up a lot of CPU.

So where does that leave me. Do i keep looking or perhaps is the scenario too tough for a computer? Backing up 200 megs of data (most of that in pretty large files). Should that really take long? Be inconvenient? Well, looks like i had more research to do...