sync without iCloud?

After I have installed Mountain Lion, I have had a number of sync issues via iTunes and for a while I thought these were the same reasons I could not sync my notes from my iPhone with the fancy new application on my Macbook.....until I came across this article informing me that it is no longer supported in Mountain Lion(!!!!): http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4191 (relevant part half way down under Syncing Notes with iTunes and OS X Mountain Lion v10.8)

I am a traditionalist when it comes to privacy and data security. I like to keep my data on my hardware behind firewall, only upload data onto the web that I genuinly want to share with others (...even to the point of using POP mail account). I have no intention to use iCloud (it seems I am not alone in this, sure you all read the comments by Steve Wozniak http://www.techradar.com/news/networking/routers-storage/apple-co-founder-thinks -the-cloud-will-be-horrendous-1091188).

The way things go, I will end up with 6 different Mac devices at home that will stop talking to each other unless I feed all the data into the cloud.

Does anyone know a way to sync everything just on your home network, without having to upload stuff to the web? Why cannot we have our own homeCloud? Any suggestions welcome (including from Apple)......Hope I will not have to abandon my Mac devices and consider (dare I even say) Windows!?