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It's the difference between a family and an institution.

When a coworker (IT staff, in your case) leaves, they get replaced.

Family just leaves a hole. Maybe some duties get taken over, maybe not. You may leave behind an IT shaped hole, but it's not really a new or unique problem. You lose the person who organized the holidays, the family reunions, the one who made the good pie, the peacemaker who kept the half-dozen warring factions cordial.

Maybe someone else steps up. Maybe not. It just gets rolled into the larger grieving process of the holes left by those we've lost.

Strong families are institutions.

You can't add a family member to the team just like that

That's why they invented marriage. /s

Too late, it's broken as one of the last competitors to The State for loyalty. Weak families mean strong States in your daily life.

Unless you’re Italian.

You can - strong families often have various hangers-on referred to as "family friend" or similar terms - who are not related by blood or marriage.

Some strong families are small.

My friend/business partner and I have an agreement to assist the other wind down our personal IT "estates" in the event of either's death. We're both competent sysadmins, and we both try to keep our "home IT" pretty comprehensible. The goal, in the event of death, is purely to wind-down, too-- not to keep services running indefinitely.

My wife knows what hard copies (my "death book") to give him if necessary. Until I die he has no access, but once I do he has my implicit trust.

I don't keep the documentation updated as often as I'd like, but it doesn't drift much between update sessions either. A life event usually prompts updating the docs. The last time I updated was the night before going in for surgery.

Besides my self-hosted stuff, I do "family IT" too. The "family IT" stuff is all documented just like one of our Customers. I made a point of insuring that my business partner could take on the family in the same way that he could take on other Customers. The goal is still probably to wind down, but it puts the family IT on somewhat similar footing to the Customers.

I gave my wife instructions on how to access my password manager. From there it has everything (both usernames, passwords, and the URL to access). The password manager has categories, so financial stuff is all together for her to go through.

You need to train them. Your idea of being a helpful hero is actually creating a single point of failure for all of them which is arguably a worse situation. IT as a hobby is fun, but by pulling others in you're actively putting them at risk.

> I've tried to mitigate this risk by keeping a so-called "death book": a hardcopy of all accounts, passwords, 2 factor auth instructions, router SSIDs, and so on, kept in the firesafe with all the other important stuff. But this Reddit post points out that this is not enough! Someone would also have to come in and take over the technical toil and maintenance that it takes to keep everything running. Not sure what the solution is.

Yeah that's the problem. They may have the passwords etc. but they don't have the knowhow to understand how the Proxmox cluster works, why the scripts aren't running, or comprehend an obscure error. It's basically a business setup at this point and would require someone with an IT background and lots of time to understand. Hell if you suddenly gave me such a setup and asked me to figure it out it would take a lot of time and trial and error as well.

The thing though is that if something happens the stuff won't all go down at once, there will be a process where hardware fails, subscriptions aren't paid, and so forth. So what I tell my family is to immediately backup the NAS files to external HDDs, create new email accounts with a public and setup forwarding for as long as it lasts (while changing their bank/Facebook/etc. to use those new emails), and so on. The telephone/internet providers may need to be changed to a user friendly residental service.

And all that has to happen fast before everything becomes inaccessible.

This made me think, but I don't think I have the problem(s) everyone else is having.

Internet account - they'll file paperwork to get access. They can continue paying the bills. Same goes for all utility accounts and online services (most of which is not a big loss - they can sign up for their own Netflix account if need be!)

Router: That's the main failure point. But they can just replace it with one the ISP gives (for a fee, of course).

Email: I have my own setup, so no one is impacted if I die.

Self hosted stuff: I think I'm the only user. Wife was using Plex for a while but doesn't any more.

Smart home: Yeah, they'll lose this. Stuff like smart switches "just work". But smart bulbs occasionally need to be reset and resynced to the hub. All in all, it's not really a great problem if they start failing.

I did add notes to my will on what I felt were the important files on my PC they may want to preserve (photos, etc). They don't use Linux so they may need help extracting them. Easy to pay someone to do it, but I have a feeling they won't really bother.

> The rest of my family has no interest in learning this stuff

What about going on strike for a day or two? Not in a petulant way, but in a loving way. Just to impress upon your family exactly how important things are, that they're currently taking for granted. Maybe you'd get a volunteer to do some modest training and succession planning.

Maybe. But in my experience, there are a lot of technical things that I value that the rest of my family just doesn’t. And losing access to things that I would consider priceless, others might just be happy to find workarounds for or recreate.

It’s really hard to force people to be interested in things that they aren’t interested in.

That's 99% of the reality right there - most people would just shrug and get a new gmail address and a new phone and tell people "oh my email changed".

My family enjoys having a simple-to-use Jellyfin setup with Infuse as a front-end; but if I'm dead eventually that ZFS server will fail in one way or another, and they'll shrug and go back to streaming or buying DVDs or something.

Attempts to explain are met with "don't bother me with talking about you being dead".

I'm in the same boat, except I recruited two people who are simi-techinical enough to at least know what are servers and services. I trust them with my computer and pw manager credentials. If anything happens to me, they will at least be able to provide credentials to any services, network, or devices I touched in the last 15 years. I hope that will be enough, or at least ease the burden.

Can you open source the information structure for this "death book"? I imagine it's a common need. Of course every family is different, so over time modularity / extension should be build into the system structure.

They need to use the password manager. They need to be able to access accounts without you. If it is one that they can't use, then you need to find one they can. Also, that is reducing the burden on you. Do they ask you to login to things?

A death book won't help a spouse. They already have enough on their plate with losing their partner.

Also when one partner dies or is ill, the other often lacks the capacity (mental etc) to deal with complex technical stuff.

There is only so much you can do though if the other people aren't prepared to learn how to use a password safe (etc).