Yes your files stay on your server, unless you share them with a friend on another server. It basically just uses libp2p as an internode communication protocol, and you need auth to retrieve ciphertext blocks.
Cool thanks! So does that mean if I want more durability/copies of the data I can just link up additional servers and they’ll sync all the data via IPFS? So like if I started with just my home NAS, then later added a VPS, and later a computer sitting at my brother’s house, I would end up with a copy of all data in all 3 locations and could access it if at least one of them was online at any given time?
At the moment if your client accesses a server with a mirror, and your primary is offline, then you can read, but not write. Writes are proxied to your primary, and thus need your primary to be accessible.