What would happen to your digital memories if you died suddenly?

BubbySoup

BubbySoup

BubbySoup

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Guy in work was lamenting the fact that he lost about 2 years worth of pics over the weekend when the hard drive in his PC died. Guy next to him proudly stated that all his pics were securely backed up to the cloud and only he knows the (very long) password.

Which is great until perhaps you die - suddenly! I'm guessing it would be almost impossible for next of kin to gain access to his account, although I've nothing to base that on. But if it's true, it means all his digital memories die with him.

So, if you have a large digital footprint in the cloud (or anywhere else) that perhaps contains family memories and only you have access to it, do you have any provision in case anything happens to you? Perhaps a big envelope in your drawer with "Open only on my death" written on it? :D
 
I have a usb with various passwords saved that get updated. Should I die my next of kin knows to frape me.

Just need to work out provisions for my video collection to delete itself :D.
 
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If I don't sign into my Google account for 3 months it automatically deletes itself and responds to any emails with a message that I'm probably dead.

Anything that I actually wanted people to have would be on hard copy.
 
I have a drive that has all the assorted naughties (wife, exes, others) upon it, and someone has instructions to deal with it if I should die.
The other driver with family stuff are backuped to another PC which duplicates the folders, and also to an external drive, so my wife would have access and would maintain the records of our family life.
 
It's a feature built in, figured I might as well make use of it. There is no good that could possibly come from digging through my stuff that I haven't elected to share with anyone, and it's not like I'll need it.
 
Anything I'd want to share with anyone is on facebook anyhow, anything else doesn't matter. (If someone wanted higher res versions they can retrieve them off my NAS or the USB drive backups of it with a little technical expertise).


(Don't put anything on online storage/online accessible storage you wouldn't want the world to see anyhow).
 
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Same here with google. It's set to notify my wife after 3 months and allow her access to my account and vice versa. Although she knows my password anyway.
 
Caged said:
If I don't sign into my Google account for 3 months it automatically deletes itself and responds to any emails with a message that I'm probably dead.

Anything that I actually wanted people to have would be on hard copy.
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Am I likely to read a news story someday about how you've been found locked inside a North Face hold all?
 
Anything I have online, my wife has the password to. My external drives, she could probably figure out the whole plugging them in thing.

Of course, whether or not she remembers the passwords is another matter - I know I've already forgotten her iCloud ones, maybe she's more competent than me :p
 
If I died suddenly I would come back as a ghost and use Dickybob as a conduit to talk to my wife. She would then move in with him and I wouldn't tell her any of those passwords because I only died two weeks ago and, what, you can't wait to jump into bed with Dickybob, is that it? Is that what happens here? "Oh, Dickybob!" you murmur, "Tell me about the demnons."

Well **** that noise. No passwords. NO PASSWORDS. I hope you and Dickybob are happy :mad:
 
It's a bit of a worry actually. I take as many steps as I can to lower my "digital footprint" and put very little about me online, but I have no idea what would happen to anything that I have no control over.

I don't use gmail so can't use the 3month kill switch thing. My hard drives are encrypted so at least they'll be useless to anyone other than the nsa. Guess my email would fill up until Yahoo finally remove it for inactivity.
 
I didn't know about the Google 3 month kill switch, I'm going to look into that. My Keepass details are in our will and that has everything except Gmail.
 
platypus said:
It's a bit of a worry actually. I take as many steps as I can to lower my "digital footprint" and put very little about me online, but I have no idea what would happen to anything that I have no control over.
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I've not considered it at all and will now take a look at what I need to do.
 
I have a simple local hard drive backup of all of my media so anyone in my family could find it. I also have printed photo books of images which are special.
 
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