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It seems like every network filesystem is irredeemably terrible. SMB and NFS the stuff of security nightmares, chatty performance issues, and awkward user id mapping. WebDAV is a joke. SSHFS is slow. You can get really crazy with CephFS or GlusterFS, and for all that complexity, you don't get much farther way from SMB/NFS issues with those either.

My solution: Share nothing and use rsync.

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Well one problem is that filesystem in general is a terrible abstraction both in terms of usability and in terms of not fitting well with how you design network applications.

I’d say Dropbox et all is closer to a good design but their backend is insanely crazy optimized to make it work and proprietary. There’s an added challenge that everything these days is behind a NAT so you usually end up needing to have a central rendezvous server where nodes can find each other.

Since you’re looking at rsync where you want something closer to Dropbox, I’d say look at syncthing. It’s designed in a way to make personal file sharing secure.

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