[Lilux-help] File synchronization

Hi gang, does anyone know of a simple way to synchronize a few user directories on two computers? I've thought of using tar to do it, but he tar archive is roughly 3 GB, which is a bit more that I want to mess with. Here is the situation: I have a desktop PC, that is my main computer at the house. It is the one connected to the internet. When at home, I use this PC to do all of my work. My second PC is a laptop. I use the laptop to take on the road and to do work when my wife is using the main PC. Currently I have an identical copy of my home directory on both PCs. Ideally, what I want to be able to do is to synchronize the home directories (basically 2 subfolders in my home directory) automatically. A tar archive could in theory work, but I think it is a bit cumbersome. I am running debian unstable on both systems (yes, I like to live dangerously). Mike