If LGM-OS disappears

5 min · 9 sections

It is the question to ask before trusting your family photos to paid software written by one person, and the short answer is this:

If I stop maintaining LGM-OS, the source goes public on GitHub and the product stops asking for a licence. Your NAS keeps working, in full, without me.

What follows explains how — and, more importantly, how to check it yourself instead of taking my word for it.

That is not an intention: the switch is already in place

The NAS asks the server whether licences are required. It is a yes-or-no question, and the answer "no" is what releases the product: the panel switches to free mode and stops looking at licences at all. That path is not a plan for some future version — it is the one your NAS already walks every day, and it has been there from the start.

So releasing the product does not require me to ship a new version, or anyone to update anything. It is a switch, already built and already exercised, in the very place where the licence is checked today.

And on the day it is flipped, the source goes to GitHub so anyone can carry on from there.

And if the server is simply down on a Tuesday?

Nothing happens, and that is deliberate:

What fails	What your NAS does
The server does not answer	Nothing changes. It carries on
The NAS has no internet	Nothing changes. The licence even activates offline
The server answers something odd	Nothing changes

The rule is written into the code itself: the product's state is never changed because of a network failure. Releasing is an explicit answer from the server; locking is never the reaction to silence. A NAS in a cupboard with no cable cannot lose its product for failing to phone home.

The worst that can happen to your NAS today

The licence expiring or being revoked. This is what happens then — data-only mode:


Your files	Visible and downloadable. All of them, to the last one
The disks	Still mounted and still monitored
Your data	Nothing is deleted
Going back	Activating or linking restores everything exactly as it was

A NAS that stops serving you your own files because something expired is a way for you to lose your photos. This product does not cross that line, and it is not going to.

Your data is not in a format of mine

This is probably what matters most:

What	In what format
The volumes	btrfs or ZFS — ordinary Linux filesystems
The shared folders	SMB, NFS, WebDAV: standards, no proprietary client
The apps from the store	Plain docker compose
The backups	rsync and rclone, to a disk, another server or your own cloud
Documents, photos and videos	The files themselves, in folders with names

Pull the disk out, plug it into any Linux machine, and there are your folders. There is no proprietary database in the middle, no index without which nothing makes sense, and no format only this panel can read.

If you encrypted the volume

Encryption is optional and you choose it when creating the volume. When you turn it on:

btrfs uses LUKS2, and ZFS its native encryption (AES-256-GCM). Both are standard: any Linux with cryptsetup or zfs opens them.
You set the passphrase and it never leaves your NAS. There is no copy on my server, no spare key, and no way in through the back.

That has another side, and it needs saying plainly: if you lose that passphrase, nobody can recover that volume. Not me either. That is what real encryption means.

What your NAS tells lgm-os.com

Only if you have linked it to your account, and this is the whole list:

What it sends	What for
The version it runs	Knowing whether it is due an update
Total and free space	So your account can show how the machine is doing
How many unread alerts it has	The same
Its name and home address	So LGM Connect finds your NAS without you hunting for it
Its certificate fingerprint	So the app knows it is talking to YOUR machine and no other
The hardware inventory	Support without asking you for screenshots. It can be turned off

What does not leave your house: your files, their names, your folders, your users, your passwords and your cameras. None of that travels, encrypted or otherwise.

How to check this yourself, without trusting this page

All of the above can be verified from your own NAS, using the panel's terminal:

# What format your data is in: btrfs or zfs, mounted like any other disk
lsblk -f
mount | grep /mnt

# The shared folders, in standard SMB
testparm -s 2>/dev/null | head -30

# The apps from the store: plain docker compose
docker compose ls

# What is being sent out, live
journalctl -u nas-panel -f | grep -i latido

And the real test, the only one that counts: take a disk out of the NAS, plug it into a laptop running any Linux, and open it. If it is unencrypted, it mounts on its own. If it is encrypted, cryptsetup open with your passphrase. Do this before you need it, not after.

And what I cannot promise you

For this to be worth anything, it has to include what I do not control:

I cannot promise the product has no bugs. It has them, and I fix them as they turn up; the full history is in Changelog, with nothing removed.
I cannot promise 24/7 support. One person runs this.
I cannot promise it will exist in ten years. Nobody can. That is why this page exists: not to swear I am not going anywhere, but so that if I do, I do not take you with me.