Ask HN: Do you have a digital end of life plan? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have a digital end of life plan?

42 pointsgehwartzen22 comments

My dad died a few years back due to unexpected circumstances so wasn't able to talk to him beforehand which made digging through his digital stuff difficult until I stumbled upon a text file on his PC with all his U/Ns and PWs. Of course thats not the best way to do it but it sure was super helpful. Bunch of stuff I didn't even think about (airline miles, Dropbox's with pictures, interesting forum content, memberships, etc. 50+ accounts total).

What's the better more secure way to store this info along with any wishes regarding your digital (after)life if I want to make it easier for my kids or whomever digs through it later? Any additional info thats helpful to include? Who to entrust it with?

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Our family uses Bitwarden with a family account. This gives both my partner and my sibling full access to shared credentials. Legacy contacts configured in iCloud and Google.

Whomever you want to wrap up your affairs should have access to your email account, as all password recovery roads lead there (caveat being Apple, if you attempt iCloud recovery without the device passcode, you could be waiting weeks to reset the account password; get those legacy contacts configured).

https://bitwarden.com/pricing/

https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT212360

https://www.androidauthority.com/data-after-death-google-fac...

It is something that I've written about and scary to even think about, especially as I just put my grandpa in hospice, whose health deteriorated in less than 2 months from going out to restaurants and supermarkets with me to not even being able to get out of bed.

There was a website that sprung up a few years ago... a woman who went through something similar, I think her husband passed all of a sudden, and its not something we think about, but not leaving any will or any wishes legally makes everything much harder.

https://getyourshittogether.org/

My spouse and I recently separated and I do not have any children, so its a constant on my mind. I could be gone tomorrow. Luckily, I don't have anything major other than a very popular website I run that would be missed, but I've always alerted anyone wanting to publish on it... I plan to be here for another 50 years... your article exists on the website for MY lifetime.

I really do wish that Google or Facebook or Microsoft would finance a "forever project" that takes over websites and archives them, so no changes are made, but the bills for it are paid. Unfortunately, it's really just not a reality that could happen. But if you do have kids, friends, etc., it might be best to leave them with your wishes and hopefully some money to try and pay for the projects or accounts you want to be there.

However, when you really think about it, the only one it really matters to is you.. and after you're gone.. your time here is done. It's not that important. It was just earthly stuff you did while you were here. Only the rich have the real contingency plans... I'm sure Zuck and Musk and Bezos and all have people to take over. Apple and Microsoft are likely already covered since Microsoft and Apple has been running without Gates and Jobs for years.

I sardonically think back to when my father (then 60) died almost a decade ago.

My brother (then 25) and I (then 19) assigned ourselves the task of clearing out the porn.

No one else had to see it, you're welcome, Dad.

You don't think about these things until they happen.

P.S. to anyone who hasn't lost someone close: there's a lot of bespoke awkwardness unique to every individual's death

Reminds me of the idea of creating a shell-script to delete and purge specified (probably smut) directories and files, to be left behind for heirs and executor and make it a little less awkward.

I don't have anything codified, but I'm 90% sure that if anything happened to me, my brother would go through my stuff and retrieve every drive from my devices. What happens after that, I've no clue.

I've never talked to him about this, but I ought to do it the next time I see him in person. At some point I plan on handing him a drive containing my backups just in case, but I'm unsure about whether to encrypt it or not, nor have I considered how he could access my password manager for my active accounts if anything goes wrong.

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If you'll excuse the self-promotion I very recently wrote a blog post about how backing up old files has suddenly felt melancholic, and I briefly mention some offhand thoughts about data after death.

https://callmeo.live/blog/the-melancholy-of-file-backups

An old-school sealed envelope in my house. Could maybe upgrade that to a bank strongbox or leaving it with a notary.

Pretty much what I do, but I have two envelopes. Those envelopes contain a small notebook with a listing of all my logins and a USB flash drive with KeePass database on it. There's one at home and one in a secure location (just in case something bad happens). I refresh them every couple of years.

Make sure to include the unlock code for your phone, for the inevitable 2FA notifications that get sent when they try to log in to your accounts. In addition to usernames and passwords, don't forget answers to security questions like "What was the name of your first pet?"

Something else I haven't seen mentioned here is a plan to transfer your work and/or clients, especially if you're freelance: who will take over your projects, and what info will they need for each client? After writing this you'll want to go over it in advance with whoever will be in charge of executing it, to ensure they understand what you've written.

> Make sure to include the unlock code for your phone, for the inevitable 2FA notifications that get sent when they try to log in to your accounts. In addition to usernames and passwords, don't forget answers to security questions like "What was the name of your first pet?"

All of that's in the notebook, along with the passcode for my 2FA app. But thanks for the reminder!

I've been building in, and watching, this space for 5+ years. It's incredibly difficult for several reasons:

1. Business model - people won't want to pay more than a few bucks a month (think Dropbox/G Drive) for this service. But unlike those, this service is much smaller TAM and much more litigious

2. Company structure - How can you ensure people's belongings will be in good hands forever, or at least a really long time. C Corp? Non-profit? What happens if your company dies?

3. Technical decisions - How can you ensure you've picked a provider that will last as long as your company?

This was one of the few interesting use cases of crypto, since it partially fixes each of these problems, but then you are back at square 1 when you realize mass market doesn't want to rely on crypto backed tech or business model.

TBD on how this problem will be solved, but I'm highly interested in it and quit my job years ago to pursue a version of digital time-capsules. It's just not a straightforward SaaS once you get into the weeds.

I don't understand why you'd want someone to dig through most of your digital stuff later. Do you think your dad really wanted that? My laptop and phone are secured with strong passwords and full disk encryption, a legitimate and intentional method of data destruction once I'm no longer in possession of them.

Our priceless family photo collection is organized in Flickr (the only account for which my wife and I share login credentials) and backed up to an unencrypted external hard drive in my desk drawer. At most, my wife and kids would lose only the last few weeks of photos that are still on my phone.

My wife has her own login credentials for our joint financial accounts. For accounts in only my name, nobody should be logging in with my credentials after I'm dead anyway; there's a proper method for notifying the institution of my death and having assets transferred to beneficiaries.

Our most important personal and financial documents (which include a listing of financial assets and institutions) are on paper in a box and / or in a shared Google Drive folder which, again, my wife can access with her own credentials.

I think it's important to be organized with the stuff that you want to pass on, but not important to make sure that everything is passed on.

1Password with a family and personal vault. Periodic dumps of this data to a safety deposit box or similar secure/reliable location. It takes a non-trivial amount of work starting from scratch, but I'd believe in this approach over some SaaS start-up promising continuity.

iCloud supports legacy contacts. Google has something called inactive account manager.

I also keep an offline backup encrypted with an estate password. The password is stored with my trust documents.

I've been thinking about this recently regarding photos – Would be sad to lose a life's worth of photos just because someone can't get into your phone.

In a similar, but different vein, I've recently found interesting to think about how all the photos of yourself tend to live on other people's phones – whereas photos on your own tend to be of places and other people.

People in general should think more about how they manage their photos. It does take some real thought now that the ubiquity of cameras means that everyone takes exponentially more photos than, say, two decades ago. I suspect that you're right: most people just have them unorganized on their phone, rolling them over to a new phone with more storage every couple of years. So, even without death, the photos are potentially gone whenever they lose or break their phone. I guess Google and Apple have turned this into a business opportunity by backing up photos to Drive and iCloud by default in Android and iOS, and then selling more storage space when it inevitably fills up.

Anything on ink and paper will outlive most of digital content/data why? Paper doesn't lose charge, it's an instant interface. if well preserved it can like centuries.

Mac owners can't even an usb from 5 years ago into their computer.

My second best.

Basically as close to analog as possible.

> Mac owners can't even an usb from 5 years ago into their computer.

Can you unpack this? I don't want to turn this into platform back-and-forth, but I've not had any issue working with older hardware on my late-model MBP. I assume this is a reference to USB C? But I have the same issue with my XPS 15. A C-to-A adapter is a simple fix.

That said, the place where I've had the most trouble is trying to mount old MacOS7/8 era filesystems onto macOS 10+. It requires some strangely janky unix of mounting individual directories. I tried a little while back to take a look at the Nautilus CD[1] that my dad had had when I was a kid and it was a mess to relive that nostalgia.

[1] https://archive.org/details/NautilusIntroV7

I do indeed have a plan. Either in heaven or hell I am sure that I won't have to be poisoned ever again by all the nonsense I've seen and believed here on these glowing boxes of lies and fantasy.

Actually yes. I use a Yubikey and password manager and have left instructions and duplicate keys in a safe deposit box.

I think at a minimum hand write the important stuff and put it in your safe or safety deposit box.

Everything else seems extra.

it is easy to digitalize, you can start from base template ;)

echo "hello world" > ./life; cat life > /dev/null

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