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?
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
gene poo
Indeed, sounds polluted enough 💩
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 will, as in “strength of will.” Basically meaning “Where there’s someone willing to do something, there will be a way to do it”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr
Seems pretty thorough.
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 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.
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!
Not sure if gonemanswitch is the one you’re referring to, but it’s the one I use.
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.
Agreed. I wasn’t suggesting to use it, but was just asking if OP was referring to that project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
