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?
Nearly everything you possess will end up in a landfill or the ocean within 10 years of your death, this is no exception.
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.
If?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr
Seems pretty thorough.
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.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.
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.
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
Replying to get notified!
So you get a notification, spacelord suggested Hereditas: https://github.com/ItalyPaleAle/hereditas
Not sure if it’s the same one OP is thinking of, though.
Edit: also, from further down: https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr
My plan is using Shamir’s Secret Sharing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_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.
It’ll die with me. Albeit probably a slow death over a couple months, I have to be realistic here - none of my family members will care enough to keep anything running in the long run.
It’s the same fate your grandma’s unfinished knitted scarves and socks had a couple years ago.
I had a few cousins who took and finished all my grandma’s unfinished quilts. They were already into quilting though. YMMV, but it is a good example - if there is someone who can understand/take this over give it to them.
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 :)
Haha! For sure not mine!
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.
