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?
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
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 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, but this does interest me a lot, so… Will be keep a tab on this.
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.
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.
https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr
Seems pretty thorough.
This is what I was trying to find for op. Well done!
👆🏻 This is the link everyone needs to look at.
It covers things like keeping your phone active for 2FA, subscriptions that need to be paid until data is saved, etc.
It’s what my SO & I use.
Very thorough
My encryption key dies with me and nobody will be bothered to save my drives and crack them.
My plan is to give my brother the password to my password manger and my best friend will get my authy backup key. With that they will be able to log in an have full access to everything.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
The garbage is another great source for treasure :)
https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-513-digitaler-nachlass-was-passiert-wenn-nerds-versterben
Its a talk by the CCC about this subject. I think there nicht be a translated Version somewhere…
