What happens to your files if something happens to you?
If one person runs the family's photos and passwords, everyone else can be locked out when they die or fall ill. What to write down, and where.
Nobody enjoys this subject, which is why it rarely gets done. A hacker is unlikely, and a failed drive can be planned for. A locked phone and nobody who knows the code is a far more ordinary way for a family to lose its photos.
One person knows how it works
Somebody set up the photo backup. Somebody chose the password manager and knows which email address the bills go to. In most households that is one person, and nobody else has needed to know, because it all just works.
It works until that person is not there. It need not be a death. A stroke, an accident or a few weeks on a ward will do it. The photo post touched on this: the only person who could prove the account was theirs is the one who has gone.
What Apple and Google offer
Both have thought about it, and both are worth setting up tonight if you use them.
Apple calls it a Legacy Contact. You name someone and they are given an access key. After your death they send Apple the key and a death certificate, and they can then reach your photos, messages, notes, files and device backups. They do not get the passwords and passkeys saved in your Apple account, or the films, music and books you bought.
Google calls it Inactive Account Manager. You choose how long the account has to sit unused, name up to ten people, and pick what each one receives. When the time is up they get an email with a link to download it. If you set nothing up, Google says it may delete an account that has been unused for two years.
There are two limits. Both have to be set up in advance, by the person who owns the account. And neither hands over your passwords, which are what the family will need for everything else.
If you run it yourself, you are the process
Running your own photo library or password vault means no company can lock your family out. It also means no company can let them in. There is no form to fill in and nobody to send a death certificate to. It is the same trade as with a password vault you run yourself: nobody else can open it, so nobody else can rescue you.
an account with Apple or Google
Who can let the family in
The company, through a process it designed.
What they will need
What you set up beforehand. For Apple, the access key and a death certificate.
If nothing was set up
They are locked out, and Google may delete an account left unused for two years.
something you run yourself
Who can let the family in
Nobody but you. There is no company to ask.
What they will need
Whatever is on the page you wrote.
If nothing was written
They are locked out for good, and it all stops when the bills do.
There is a second problem that the big accounts do not have. Something keeps a self-hosted setup alive. There may be a web address that renews every year, a monthly bill for a rented server, and updates that someone has to install. An unused Google account can sit there for two years. A server whose bill stops being paid is switched off, and the warning emails go to the one person who is not there to read them.
The one page to write
Give it a plain title, such as “If I’m not here”. Write it for someone who is upset and not technical.
- What there is. The photos, the passwords, the documents. Say in ordinary words where each one lives: which box, which drive, which room, which company.
- How to get the photos and files out. Give the simplest route, one that does not need the system to be working. Something like “the black drive in the desk drawer plugs into any computer, and the photos are in folders by year”. If the backup is locked with a password, that password has to be on this page, or the backup is no use to them.
- How to open the passwords. Either the main password, written on paper and sealed with this page, or a feature built for the job. Bitwarden’s apps have one called emergency access. You name a person. If they ever ask to be let in, you get an email, and if you do not refuse within the waiting time you chose, they are given access. On Bitwarden’s own service it needs a paid account.
- How to open the phone and the computer. The passcodes. A lot of sign-ins now live on the device itself, so a phone nobody can unlock takes those with it.
- What costs money, and when. Every renewal, with the date, the amount and the card it comes from. Say which ones matter and which can be left to lapse.
- Who to ring. One named person who understands this sort of setup and has agreed to help.
- How to shut it down. The family may not want to run a server, and the page should say that is fine. Give the order: copy everything out first, then cancel.
Where to keep it
Keep it with the will and the other important papers, sealed, and tell the person it is for that it exists.
Do not put it in the will itself. In England and Wales, once probate has been issued, anyone can order a copy of a will for £16. Solicitors keep this sort of thing separate. The Law Society’s guidance for will writers recommends a separate log of assets, kept alongside the will, and digital things belong on it.
Do not keep the only copy on the phone it explains how to unlock, or inside the password manager it explains how to open.
A caution on the law, with the warning that we are not lawyers. Logging in to a dead person’s account with a company can break that company’s terms, and solicitors warn that it can be an offence. For accounts held by a company, use the company’s own route. For a server the family owns, tell whoever is handling the estate that it exists.
Give someone else the keys now
Better than any page is a second adult who can already get in. Give them their own sign-in today, with the same control over everything that you have, and let them use it now and then. Nobody is locked out of a system that two people run.
Test it
Hand the page to the person it is for. Ask them to find one photo from a particular year, and do not help.
Whatever they get stuck on is a gap in the page, so fix the page. It is the same rule as with a backup: until somebody has done it for real, you do not know that it works.
None of this costs anything. What running your own costs in money is a separate question, and we did those sums too.