If Mahanu disappears tomorrow

Mahanu guide · For builders & learners · FAQ · Philosophy

Every feature here answers to one test: delete Mahanu tomorrow — what do its users still have? This page is the answer, kept short because the answer is short.

What you still have

• All of the work that reached a desktop vault. Each desktop copy is a folder of open-format files — Markdown you can read, images you can open, all in standard formats. No conversion or rescue mission: the files were in their final, readable form the whole time.
• The full history on that desktop. A desktop vault keeps the Timeline sidecar locally. The current files need no software at all; browsing history needs the app — which brings us to:
• The software itself. MIT-licensed, all of it. It's already on your computer, anyone may keep copies, and anyone may continue it. There is no license server, no activation, nothing that can be switched off remotely.
• The sync. The server is MIT too and runs from one compose file, so a family or a fork can keep syncing without us. And a project needs no server at all to keep working on one machine.

What you'd lose

Our hosted relay, its backups, and the public directory — the conveniences. Not the work or history that reached a desktop vault, and not the software.

One honest caveat

On the web client (phones, borrowed computers), a synced project is safely backed up on the hosted server, and the browser holds a working cache. That is useful, but it is not an independent file vault: if the hosted service vanished before any desktop or self-hosted copy existed, you would depend on whatever the browser still retained. Use Download this project as a folder in the web app for a readable copy anytime, open the project once in the desktop app, or self-host — any of these makes the durable files promise yours (desktop and self-hosting also keep the history).

Why there's no "export" button

Export is what you do when your data lives somewhere else, in someone else's format. Here there's nothing to export — the readable files on your disk are the data, and everything else (sync, history views, the directory) is built on top of them, not the other way around. (The web app's Download this project as a folder isn't an export in that sense either: it's the same readable files, handed to a device that doesn't hold them yet.)

That's the whole promise, and it doesn't depend on our good behavior — it's enforced by how the thing is built (the philosophy, №10).