One thing to keep in mind with something like Syncthing is where the physical location of the other machine(s) is. The nice thing about cloud storage is that your data is in an entirely different geographic region, so if there’s a hurricane, flood, fire, etc. your data is still safe. That being said, I use Google drive at the moment so I’ll also be keeping an eye on this post for alternatives.

How did they get access to the shaft to throw trash into it?

That was the one where the dog ate a box of crayons right? It was right around the same time as the 2am chili and the ice soap if I remember correctly.