My will contains the master password for my keepass file, from there someone could theoretically handle everything.
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I decided very long ago not to pollute the gene pool, so everything dies with me.
ETA: It's comforting to know that 10 people agreed with my life decision. /s LOL
No :/ my server will probably die with me. My people are going to complain why homeassistant isn't working, why automated lights don't turn on and why nothing has been added to the plex library in forever. Just not sure who they'll complain to lol.
At the end of the day, its my hobby and they'll just have to live with how it was before. The hardware will be there if anyone wants to start up their own thing, but I don't see it happening.
And this is why I try to recommend to every single person starting their smart home to plan it so that if everything dies, their internet, their router, power gets restarted, and their HomeAssistant gets corrupted, and you die, at the same time, that everything will work exactly as expected, because with MANY smart home systems they will just stop functioning or be stuck in a bad mode until your family hires someone to fix it.
That's why I lean hard towards KNX
Nearly everything you possess will end up in a landfill or the ocean within 10 years of your death, this is no exception.
Why's that? So much of my treasure comes from estate sales etc, they don't make stuff like they used to. I would say 90% of what I own has passed through someone else's hands, and a pretty good chunk of em have themselves passed
It's more common to be wasteful and irresponsible. Literally tons of high quality stuff is thrown in the garbage because people want a shitty plastic one that's more up-to-date and stylish, and more to the point, not used.
https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr
Seems pretty thorough.
There's a project on github just for this, I forget what it's called.
Basically they've developed a mechanism for providing instructions and access to security (usernames, passwords, etc).
I'll see of I can find it
Looks interesting but explicitly says it’s “alpha software “ and hasn’t been updated in five years. I’d be weary of using something like this in such a critical situation.
Replying to get notified!
Not sure if gonemanswitch is the one you're referring to, but it's the one I use.
I do, and it's probably the main reason I started self hosting.
Managing parents estate made me want to get my shit in order for my own kids in the event I die. There's a good chance that if I die, my cell phone is gonna die with me. And commercial services from Apple, Google, banks, and other institutions are increasingly tied to a single cell phone as "identity." If you try to login on a device with no session cookies, they treat it as hostile, and do all sorts of oddball stuff that almost always requires the cellphone to access. And if you don't have that phone, it's incredibly hard.
By self hosting, I can choose to make access to that most of that data much easier for my family if I die and my cellphone dies with me. I don't expect them to continue self-hosting, but I do want them to have easy access to files so they can move them to some system they are comfortable with.
Bitwarden has a account custodian feature that will give my wife all the info she needs to access essential accounts and hardware, however, realistically the homelab will only continue to work until things start dropping - there is likely no easy recovery of crashes.
I haven't talked to my wife about it directly, you've reminded me this would be a good conversation to have, but the first thing she should do when the insurance money comes in is (after paying off the assassin) buy a bunch of dumb light bulbs and pay to print any photos she cares about in case our digital backups die.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
My plan is using Shamir’s Secret Sharing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing) to split my encrypted master password in 3: one for my wife, one for my mother and one for my best friend. In case I die, only 2 of those parts are needed to recover the password.
I set a friend as an emergency contact for my Bitwarden vault, so he can request access, and if I don't deny it within 2 weeks he's granted access.
I'm also working on a kind of digital dead man switch. Basically, I'll make it so that you give it some last messages, which are assigned to groups of recipients. The service will send you an email at a specified interval (for example, every month) with a link in it. If you don't click on the email a few times, you're marked as dead and the last messages get sent out to their corresponding recipients.
I've made a note in a paper notebook with my master password for the password manager for my wife, but she's totally uninterested in anything I do with my server - she tried to understand, but it didn't work. At least she'll have access to my emails and other stuff in case I die before her.
Same here. I don't see how she would manage, she's not THAT technical. I told her she'd probably be good for another few years barring breaking updates. Beyond that, she'll need to find someone to retrieve any content she wants to keep. For this reason, I keep all photos with a paid service (ente) as I don't want to risk her losing those.
INB4: she = MY wife, not yours :)
Since others were posting end of life style docs, here is another: https://www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.htm
My Gmail account has the Inactive Account Manager thing turned on so if I don't use my account for 6 months it'll email my wife my Bitwarden master password and instructions to get my self-host nerd into it where he can then do whatever he wants with it.
When my brother's brother-in-law passed, he gave all that to my brother. Both on the high end of tech/self-hosting capabilities. I've come to the conclusion much of it wasn't worth it.
I'll be focusing on ensuring access to financial accounts is passed on cleanly. And I'm working on digitizing all remaining physical photo negatives, then planning how to share all digitally with family while still alive. Since I don't expect any to be interested in maintaining a server after I'm gone, I'm thinking I'll keep it simple and just give everyone an external hard drive with all the photos. It's up to them to do what they want with the drive. A copy to each sibling is increases odds it's survives for a generation.
I'll make project notes and plans available to anyone interested, but no hard feelings if no one is interested. And my music and movies can disappear for all I care. My tastes are pretty mainstream so I'm not thinking about archival value.
I want to be buried with my treasure, and as a data hoarder I will have to leave instructions for writing it all to tape.
Yeah, have a tech mate ready to step in, like a "porn buddy" https://youtube.com/shorts/kgu3PzpKhn4
I bought a separate laptop and set it up with an encrypted password that both my wife and I know. It contains instructions on everything from my self hosted stuff to anything else related to my personal life that she would need. It's 100% offline to keep it safe from a network compromise. This whole thing was especially important since I wanted to make sure my family could access all photos, calendar, contacts, etc for the last decade that are stored on my server.
It takes time to transfer everything to it (all in Obsidian) since it's a brain dump... But it actually benefits me too. I've had a few times where I was like "how the hell did I set that up?" and had some instructions on there the helped lol.
Definitely recommend this to others to consider.
I should set up that bitwarden feature that lets people ask for access and they get it if you don't respond in a set amount of time.
hardware I'm giving to my sister most likely. Software? well that's definitly dying with me. I'm the only one in my family that has any form of technical skill required to keep services going. They won't know what to do with it.
The most I'm able to share is pictures and files.
The part how they cloud technically access all relevant files, seems easy to me. As mentioned in other comments, just give someone or somewhere you trust your master password.
Virtually impossible, that my dear ones actually can make any use of this. They don't even know how to use a command line, not to mention how to decrypt a luks partition. In the end, they will get some linux friend to do this, copy all files on a nfts external drive and hook this up to a Windows machine. So glad, I don't have to experience this monstrosity anymore.
I know of this project: Dead Man Hand
I doubt anyone else will know how to deal with the server tbh. Nobody else really uses it, either. Inertia's a pain, and while I do technically have other users here, I think the most recent login aside me was 6 months ago. They'll have access to the password to get into stuff to handle whatever accounts they need to, and I may include instructions on how to turn my blog into an epub file if they want to do that, but the server itself likely won't last more than a month after I die.
Passwords, usernames and access keys are all important, but what about technical knowledge? If you're the one hosting all of that, it's presumably because you're the most knowledgeable about that in your group. Without you, even if they have access, will they know how to keep things running, especially when things go wrong?
I figure by then, it will all be part of some AI training set one day. Hopefully my shitty writing and bad opinions poison the shit out of it.
I created a text file with all the IPs, server name, and function and some general notes. I don’t use good passwords in my home network, sue me. But my master password should go into the will stored with lawyer.
It’s enough to get started but my family will have to find someone to help them at some point as they don’t have the technical skills I do.
It’s in my will, but most of my days isn’t useful without need to use it or me.
My will has a page of important passwords, accounts, where important documents are kept.
All my personal data is on encrypted partitions and drives. The only data that would be left behind is whatever I was hosting on my Raspberry Pi's. Anyone can do what they please with that data, it doesn't matter to me. The encrypted stuff can be easily wiped and the hardware can be reused by whoever comes after me.
My encryption key dies with me and nobody will be bothered to save my drives and crack them.
Realistically no. My wife primarily uses the ad blocking dns and smb file storage. I’ve built the server on FreeBSD so those should run near forever if I passed, and she knows she has until the server dies to find somewhere else to put her photos. Past that there’s a maintenance document next to the will, which includes everything up to how to replace drives on zfs, but I doubt she’d use it if I’m being honest.
I thought about that, I should write a manual so any friend who is in IT could take over one way or another; passwords are already ok with the takeover mechanism provided by Bitwarden
I only do self-hosting for personal/family purposes, and both my mother and my girlfriend have access to all the family-related data.
My personal stuff will go with me to the grave, but I doubt they need prints of my thesis and stuff like that.

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