From iLife to iDeath: Is my digital legacy too secure?

Due to a terminal illness in the family I have had cause to think about what we leave behind and who will see it. Previous generations left a trail of letters, diaries, photograph collections, address books, record collections, books and so on – replete with the person’s handwriting and doodles in many cases.

However with all our advances in using computers to store pretty much everything, we are most probably denying our loved ones these insightful gifts that could speak volumes about our lives after they are over. I’m not talking so much in a social history sense, which I have heard discussed several times before, but on the personal emotional level.

For my generation at least, it’s quite typical for few people in the family to have in-depth computer knowledge. Let alone being able to extract data from the computer, most will not even realise there is significant information there and will likely reformat the computer to use it, or sell it or give it away. That could be like giving away close to all of your sentimental possessions, and they wouldn’t even know they were doing it.

Even if somebody in the family does understand computers, if you have a good secure operating system like Apple OS X or Linux, and maybe even Windows XP, there’s a good chance they will never be able to recover your files unless you leave records of your user and/or root passwords for your benefactors to use. This in itself is quite easy to do but it assumes that you will have weak security and rarely change your passwords.

People are increasingly living their lives online, so this is not just a problem of losing copies of received emails or digital files from loved ones – entire photo collections, catalogues of favourite website bookmarks (in future perhaps as valuable as passing down your collection of favourite authors) etc may be stored in online services and yet not publicly accessible.

If this seems petty, it pays to think what your kin would do to recover:

• Your digital photos and videos. You may have thousands of family digital photos not committed to a physical medium
• Your MP3 (or other) music collection. Gone are the days of your kids inheriting a mountain of 12″ black vinyl to enthuse over and stir sentiment. The days of CDs are numbered. My music collection now lives on a little black box that is an IP NAS box (network hard disk)
• Your sent and received emails. Innocuous communication can give loved ones a real insight into your life – but without the appropriate passwords and account details it could be impossible to salvage them.
• Your blog archive

I imagine there will eventually start to be a collection of services appearing around these issues – maybe password or key escrows, remote long-term archive of all data from the services you use, or specialized data recovery services, with consultants that can tell you what you can expect to recover from your loved one’s digital life.

It’s certainly not as romantic as receiving a pile of handwritten letters tied with a bow, a stack of classic vinyl records or a box full of family photos. However I have to wonder how I will leave my children with mementos of my life and maybe some signs of the things I did with my life online. I use a computer 8+ hours per day. There has to be some way they will be able to rifle through my virtual papers to see what I did, what I cared about?

Or will our benefactors be left to use google or the wayback machine to search for what public fragments of our lives have been archived without explicit effort?