I am a sysadmin by trade, and I do what I do at work at home as well for fun. I have a Gentoo Linux laptop, Raspberry Pis running Raspian, a Gentoo server, ARM devices running Debian and have various Android devices. I am always wrestling and worrying about backing up and synchronizing my own home directory among disperate devices, while keeping it reasonably safe from prying eyes.
I had experience with Andrew in the '80s at CMU, and it was like magic. I would consider NFS if it had some mechanism to handle disconnected access and didn't presume a constant network connection.
Would OpenAFS be something that admins out there might consider to handle synchronizing the data of "lightly connected" hosts of the modern user?
I've also considered things like Lustre. I am looking for something that requires moderate maintenance after initial setup. It seems like OpenAFS might also be interesting in that I could divide the homes into administratively different subdirectories, which might be distributed to different devices in different measure. (E.g. a ~/mobile for files which must reside on my phone and tablets, ~/pi for Raspberry Pi files, etc.)
Is OpenAFS a dead end for this purpose?