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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You vastly overestimate boomers-era individuals (and really the entire general population). Beyond turning things on and ‘everything magically works’, most know fuck all about tech.
I know that if I croak tomorrow, while my ex partners and a couple friends would be able to piece together things, 1) they’d have to be informed that I’m dead, 2) they’d have to be asked to help with my different hosts, and 3) they’d need to remember where I physically put the password in case of emergency to access the main host (with all of the family’s important shit, like all of it). Assuming they got those three things done, they would have to convey to the ex/friend how to access the main node, and then figure out my password manager master password, and the mfa (multiple options), or assume it’s inaccessible and use the physical password to retrieve the data and restore… on an OS none of them has ever used before.
Assuming all that is doable, after the restore is to maintain the system and the containers, perpetually, as well as continue paying for the domains so they can access the services hosted on the nodes, and continue paying for my vps and the backup storage strategy (two different companies on two different continents alongside the local copy).
As I have literally almost died before (I was supposed to have died, according to doctors who saved me), I have tried to make this hypothetical situation easy, and still it would astonish me if they get past like step #2.
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