Author here, I've had plenty of excuses to use my Pi in the past, this is just the latest one. I think you are incorrect in characterizing this as "fragile dogshit", this solution is in fact much more robust than my previous cloud solution.
BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.
> BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.
So for example, if a person was working on a thesis document and then accidentally overwrote that with a blank version which gets synced across all the nodes, it would be possible to reverse this action and recover the original thesis document ?
While I haven't exercised this functionality yet my understanding is yes that is possible. You can specify the number of days to store history. (defaults to 30)
most here would keep his/her document versioned in subversion or git. I don't think technically minded individuals don't confuse syncing and backups (or versioning). This however does not apply to non-technical people. That is where dropbox is a win, since they do versioning.
BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.