This question is mainly for those that have family/friends depending on their self-hosted services/data. Does anyone have a plan for the worst case scenario in terms of data access/passwords/making sure your services are kept running if people depend on them? I know I sure don’t, it’s just a strange curiosity my brain thought up and I wondered if anyone else had considered this?
My will contains the master password for my keepass file, from there someone could theoretically handle everything.
This is the origin of the phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
I uhh… I don’t think that’s right… But I also dont know enough about the idiom to prove you wrong…
It’s the theoretically part that i haven’t figured out. I know none of my family members would have any idea what to do with anything. I feel like All the Data will just be lost when i go… which is a huge issue as everything moves to digital.
Test it. Seriously.
There are likely roadblocks you haven’t seen. For example, it is increasingly true that login & password aren’t good enough to access most commercial systems. So many businesses rely on active session cookies to determine identity, and if that’s missing, they’ll fallback to email or SMS based one-time passwords. And if they don’t have access to your laptop or phone, it might be impossible for them to gain access.
You could make a document describing what each set of data is, if its useful to anyone but yourself, or if its safe to delete. You could offer suggestions of what to do with each set. I think of it as a treasure map that you leave behind. Maybe they will be interested in it, maybe they will pass it on to someone else.
I actually started doing that. It’s a living document, shared with others. It’s the best solution I’ve come up with. Knowing whether or not I can convey enough info to make it usable and able to be followed for a less technical person like other family members drives my adoption of software/hardware solutions.
Your family members are unable to ask someone else who knows something about it to help with it? X to doubt.
But… Why do you care? What kind of information is on there? Something like the Epstein files?
At least for me, the only stuff that’s really on there is some music, photos, backups. If it gets lost, nothing important really is lost.
Photos are pretty important to a lot of people, I know that’s the most obvious thing on my server that people would miss and not be able to get anywhere else
that’s very smart