Hi,

I today I "broke" my pic lib. I've 2 Servers with syncthing mirroring it over 2 different places. That was very stable but today I added my workstation with the same lib (but with right file attributes because I broke them on the servers due to rsync...). So to preserve my attributes I set the Workstation folder to send only.
While the workstation was initial scanning there was a button to override changes or smth. I pressed it and the syncthing from my workstation updated the global folder status to its local and continued scanning.
The servers, holding the whole lib started after that to remove the files not listed in the status... -> legitimate.

BUT I had set the servers to do simple file versioning. So all of the files are still available on the servers but they don't use them (or parts of it) and instead downloading it again over DSL/Cable....

tl;dr

Make use of blobs/files available from .stversions folder.