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What Happens To Your Data When You Die?
dacarr writes "Your data - that is, the personal web pages and projects you have worked on to make the 'net a better place - are presumably password protected. But sooner or later the time will come when you take that last breath, and with you goes your passwords, but not your data. It's still there for your benefactors to deal with. And while many famous people who are no longer with us (e.g., Douglas Adams or Chuck Jones) have a staff for this, well, many of us don't. As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
That said, I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files. Some of it is sentimental stuff like letters and writing. I imagine if someone decides it is worth publishing, it may live on significantly past my life time. Perhaps none of it will, but I'm not too worried about that, I'm happy that my "important data" lives on in the only place that matters, in the memories of my family and friends.
Basically, usefull and/or popular information has an indefinite life span because people will preserve, expand and share it. Call it the natural selection of information. We don't really need to do anything different to keep that going. Frankly, it's a good thing that useless and unimportant data dies, I'd hate to think that a future historian would be forced to search through petabytes of things like 100 year old Slashdot first-posts in order to find information about our recent war with Iraq.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
...why do I care? I'll be dead.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I can't speak for Douglas Adams but Chuck Jones' entire enterprise is handled by his lovely daughter Linda who literally busts her butt to run everything. That's hardly a "staff". Chuck would have been content to never have drawn another cel or market anything but thank heavens Linda suggested it.
/.ers reading this should be concerned
with one thing: finding a porn erase buddy and give them a housekey and all of your passwords.
The idea is that if you die unexpectedly your porn erase buddy will go into your machine, clear your machine of all the pornographic files. In addition you can also have him/her to clear out your conventional
meatspace porn so your Momma will still highly of you even after you're gone.
Timothy Leary is another good example of dedicated fans who keep the site running after he died and an even better example is Peter McWilliams who put the entire text of all of his books online before he passed on. I recommend Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do. The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country.
Frankly as far as data and death are concerned most of you
This is exactly why you make a will. Passwords...how ever you store them...should be left to the people you wish to have said information. It's that simple
Since very few (eg: 2) here have the main access passwords to the systems (root, administrator, dba, etc...) I have printed up a copy of the password card and have it in a sealed envelope stored in a safe. My boss, the company's CFO has the combination to the safe to get at it should either of us get whacked.
I don't delude myself into thinking that someone cares about getting into my personal data, but I have another envelope in a safe at home, and the combination is left with my lawyer with instructions to give it to my beneficiary.
-buf
When you die, your passwords die with you. (Unless you have them written on a note stuck to the bottom of your keyboard ;) ) But if you get Alzheimer's, they also go...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
"our digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die"
No, they won't be. I have a cousin who's been doing estate law for ~40 years and I've helped him on some extremely difficult cases where clients did not leave their passwords. You're personal affects and papers are accessible, unless you take positive steps you're digital affects probably won't be.
A lot of folks may not want next of kin going through their hard drives, but there probably is stuff on there that an heir or executor will -need-. Give secure storage of these things and continuity of access real thought please.
One can put all sorts of things into a Will for the executor to deal with.
Everyone over 18 should have one, not only does it protect what you own, you can reach out and exact revenge upon people after your death with a Will.
Someone always mean to you? Will them a Nickel as a fuck you. Someone who betrayed me is getting a "bright shiny quarter" from me because "that's all they are worth." Have a friend with questionable musical tastes? Will them some CDs. I've got a buddy who is getting my classic rock collection so he "listens to something else".
Have a beer, and dictate your will to someone, sign it and be protected. In many states if you kick without one, the State gets all your stuff.
i wonder who/what's maintaining it and how? perazzoli.org is registered to him but expires in january 2005. perhaps some of his colleagues could pick up on it and preserve it in his memory. its a bit sad imagining what look like his enthusiastic life ending sometime after his last blog entry of Saturday, November 29, 2003
For those who might answer, "well, my pr0n collection would be embarassing," I gotta ask: how so? You'll be well past the point of caring.
The stuff that I bother to encrypt, and the data that I do worry about is that which could obstensibly get me in trouble while I'm alive. Once I die, I couldn't care less who looks through what.
The people around you, you insensitive clod?
Isnt this one of the major reasons why you should plan on signing over you copyright to FSF so they can make sure that its available and that the protections are ensured even after death. Another option would be to setup a family trust and put the code as IP in the trust, this allows for all you anti-GPL swine to retain your rights. Of course if your family trust votes to GPL your work about all you can do is roll over and fart dust.
Good grief - there are so many things that can go wrong, and the next thing you know all your data is erased and people are notified of your death. All because the phone network went down while you were on a trip, or the inet connection dies (happens way too often here).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Why aren't your passwords in your legally protected last will and testament? A trusted 3rd party can then divulge the passwords on your passing, along with all your other 'property'.
When my uncle passed away last year, he had left passwords and files in a safe place at work. He was ill, and was smart enough to prepare, at least for his work files.
Two of his home computers were taken by his brothers and reformatted, losing his entire website and tons of priceless photos and the like. I have his laptop, but I can't seem to get around needing a password, and haven't had time to crack it. I'm just glad my mom managed to get that.
The moral of the story is, work is important, but some of us left behind would like to be able to get those nice photos of you, or be able to save your website from being lost, so make sure you follow through and talk to your wife :)
DoggMy father passed away due to a sudden heart attack in 2002. He hadn't prepared for something like this at all - he was in his mid 50s and in great shape. Outside of his main Mac desktop, i have no idea where his stuff is. His work machine was wiped when he was laid off about 6 months earlier (he worked in IT). I have tried to access any accounts of his that i knew of - ebay and paypal were the only important ones, the BBS accounts didn't matter so much - to see if there was anything that needed to be taken care of. But i didn't have his password, and the hint was "same as password." I still haven't been able to access either of those accounts, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some money in the PayPal - he was really into ebay.
he might have had some information stored on his Palm, but the battery died and everything was lost before i even thought to check it. That still irks me.
It is weird whenever i stumble upon an archived forum post made by him. It's like he's still alive, but nowhere near me physically. That's a little piece of his mind, words said and recorded. The same goes for his email. When I was making sure to tie up loose ends, i was reading mails he had sent and recieved just a few days earlier, when he was in seemingly perfect health.
Data, especially communication, is much like a photograph. Only instead of archiving some physical thing or event, it's a snapshot of someone's brain or personality.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I'll be dead.
If the files are stored on a personal hard drive, then it's absolutely trivial to get them off if they're not encrypted (even the user account itself is password-protected).
If they're stored by someone else like, say, the person's ISP or business, then surely faxing a death certificate will coax them into releasing the files for you?
That's why you need a redudant system: I've thought about making one myself where it monitors not only my blog, but also my Slashdot/K5 accounts (no postings on all 3 in a month? - possibly dead) and maybe ping my home machine (which is usually connected 99.9% of the time) - all come up "no response/updates" for 30 days? Kill everything... Of course, by then, my credit card will probably be blocked by the bank so my hosting company would have k'lined the server anyway so the data would be wiped...I think I've just come across a small flaw(!)
On the other hand, the last couple years of my mother-in-law's life, as she was dying of the usual effects of decades of smoking, we got her a computer and taught her to use email. She was able to communicate with most of her friends during those years. And when we got to organizing a memorial, it was very handy to have her address book on hand. We sent out the invitations from her computer, and most of the people showed up. We offered them any saved email that they wanted, but none took advantage of it.
...
A few months later, after determining that there really wasn't anything there that we should be keeping, so I formatted the disk and installed the latest RedHat. It's now my "crash and burn" machine for testing dangerous-looking new things, like a new distro.
I've gotta add some more memory and disk to that box
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I understand that the audience here at slashdot.org is primarily comprised of "techies," but is the most significant thing that you -- even as a techie/scientist/nerd/whatever -- will or want to leave behind is some (encrypted) "data" protected by passwords? I hope to do more than "create data" while I'm here on this planet. I sincerely hope there is more to life than this. (Maybe I'm in for a rude awakening. Yesterdays chop wood and carry water could be today's program computer, execute program.)
Forget my passwords and forget my data, remember (your relationship with) me.
Some cats swing, and others don't. Don't you be the kind that won't.
Suicide is indeed kind of hard to understand unless you're in that frame of mind yourself... and if you are then the idea can be, well, helpful is the wrong word, but an apparent though clearly terminal option. Most times one approaches life with a fairly, "This is what is going to happen so I may as well live with it", sort of attitude. Suicide is what comes to mind when that idea isn't particularly bearable; as a kid I found the knowledge that the option was available to be quite a source of strength, even, since it means that you are choosing to live your life while you do - and you have the option of quitting the stage. n.b. I appreciate that this is no doubt a sad and sick attitude, for which I apologise - I don't condone the idea, only place it in a context. It's unlikely to ever be a good option to actually take, but sometimes the only apparent control one has over one's life is the ability to fiddle with the off switch, and the sort of depression that leads that to (really, honestly) sound like a good idea is not easy to live through. Living is a hard option. Certainly it is a better one also from any sensible perspective, given that suicide is not reversible, but particularly to one with little self-esteem, it is not entirely clear why this should be the case.
Scuse the stream-of-consciousness... and the anonymous. Slashdot doesn't seem quite like the place to get candid about depression whilst logged in.
It's hard to understand unless you've been there. Even if you've been there (as I have) it's hard to understand when you're not there.
Try to imagine feeling down, I mean lower than you've ever been. Not working? Try to imagine being parapalegic or losing all of your limbs, not being able to do anything on your own. Add to that being in excruciating pain that makes you cry all the time, and you are mute. Then translate this physical pain into emotional pain. Sometimes we put animals (and people!) out of their misery because they are in incredible pain; that is the justification for suicide.
This is the conclusion I've come to and one of the few things that has kept me alive. It might also interest some to know that I will never attempt suicide because I am an atheist. I believe this is the only life I have, after this I will cease to exist. No matter how painful this life may be, I've contemplated not being and decided I don't want to take that path until I absolutely have to.
Are you sure your friend was not just depressed, but manic depressive? This sounds very much like manic depression (IANAP), and makes it that much more dangerous because people seem all fine and dandy until they end up killing themselves. On the other hand, he may have been trying, but ultimately failed; excersize can be a good counter to depression.
In any case, I am sorry for your loss. As I am not religious, I cannot honestly say that I'll pray for him, but you have my deepest condolences.
I think it would be kind of neat to give your children/nephews and such your username and password to slashdot, as well as other places you post at/belong to. Then they could have insight into your mind and stuff. See what type of person you were and such.
Would be pretty cool, unless you were a troll.
...
Think I should go erase all those old girlfriends' numbers?
Nah, I'll just let her think that I've been fooling around these past 10 years. hehe
She knows I'm one of the few truly loyal husbands that know what vows mean still in existence.
Someone mentioned that we over estimate the value of our data. That's probably true.
While I acknowledge this, I've thought of the archiving issue too. I've been working on my web site www.bearcave.com since 1995. The material published on this web site represents the largest work I've completed that does not belong to someone else. I intend to keep adding to it. In the long run it may represent the largest work I've accomplished in my life.
Egotist that I am, I'd like it to survive me. I have searched and I did not find any web repository except for the Internet Archive, which attempts to archive the Internet. The Internet Archive has archived bearcave.com, so there is some chance that my work will be around when I'm not. The way things are going there will probably come a time when you can carry around the current Internet Archive in your pocket, so the costs of archiving should drop, which also provides some hope that the Internet Archive data itself will survive.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive is not an ideal solution. Given bandwidth issues, they cannot afford to update too frequently. Also, while the Internet Archive is locally searchable, I don't think that is is searchable by search engines like Google. So material on the Internet Archive is not as accessible as other material on the Web.
There appears to be a possible business here (perhaps at the non-profit level). I'd be willing to pay money into an escrow account and a monthly fee to have my web site scanned weekly. The when I die my web site would no longer be scanned and my data be available to the web on the new site.
The problem with such a business is that it would probably have to be set up as a non-profit. The concentration of an archiving business is to pay its bills and survive in the long term, not make lots of money for its founders or shareholders.
There are some technical complexities as well. Internal links between web site pages would have to be changed so that they worked at the new location. But it should not be too difficult to write conversion software.
Thank you for a reply relevent to what I wrote. In the case of papers most people use safe deposit boxes. That's the very best example of the contrast between paper and digital, your death certificate will get you somewhere with a bank deposit box. They have to give it to S.Heir/executor, sure there may be a day or two wait, but it's a legal guarantee. There is no legal guarantee of delivery with encrypted files.
For others replying here, why would you just assume that other people are so stupid that they don't know about boot disks? I mean, I know we're supposed to be arrogant because we're technical but isn't there -some- sort of limit to that? Most people (that I know) with estates who store private data on their FS' use encryption. Actually, not using encryption -would- be stupid IMHO and I assumed folks in a technical forum would be encrypting.
My father died suddenly about a year ago. He maintained 3 different web sites, one personal, one for a sailing club he belonged to, and one for his cousin's business. He was the sole contact for two of the registrar, plus there were web hosting passwords, ftp server passwords, isp account passwords, email account passwords. Luckily, my mother and I knew all his passwords and have been able to keep everything running. Security is important but it's not a bad idea to have someone else know how to get in to certain things just in case. Email is probably the most important thing because you can usually get people to change your password and email you the new one.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Use a master password and have at least one other person you trust implicitly, who knows it. "Security risk," blah blah. If you don't even have one person in the world who you can trust with your passwords while alive, then there really isn't anyone important enough to need your data when you're dead. I trust pacts more than passwords. Pacts can't be cracked.
Ps: I do not agree that suicide would help people getting rid of their problems. Killing yourself is only the start of the real hurricane.
Well, by the time you're dead, you won't care about anything else, so it's, in a way, effective to get rid of problems. But... since you won't feel or think about anything, it's pointless.
I've never been so depressed to consider to kill myself, but I've thought that my depression would never go away. It's horrible. And I thought it was all my fault! Then, it ocurred to me that the cause was not me, but a chemical imbalance on my brain. So, as a last resource, I went to a psychiatrist (nobody suggested it to me), he got me some treatment, and holy molly, the result showed in 24 hours!!!
Want to suicide? Don't know how to deal with the way you feel? You have nothing to lose... go to a psychiatrist, my friend, and follow his/her treatment for a week at least (This is not advertising!!!!).
I believe that self-diagnosis is a huge step in beating depression. If I wake up and think "I don't want to go anywhere", I can try and think that it's stupid chemicals doing that to me, and I try to remember the times that I'm not depressed and how good that actually feels. Knowing that there is that bright part in life (instead of remembering all the pain) helps greatly.
Sure it doesn't always work, but it still works some of the days.
Agreed.
Generally there are two types of depression, although you rarely get one without aspects of the other. They also tend to feed off of each other.
The first is clinical depression, which means that chemicals are screwed up in your brain and you need medication. I was on so many different meds over the years until we finally found one that worked.
The second is situational depression, which basically means your life sucks. This can be manifested through physical or emotional abuse or so many other factors. Mine was more situational than chemical, but that's all relative. The chemical aspect alone would have been enough to take me out of life.
I refer to mine as "clinical depression" even though it was more situational just because that forces people to realize that there is a medical aspect to it.
My saying is that "medication gets you stable, counseling gets you fixed." If the meds that you are on aren't working and haven't been for several weeks, SWITCH. Effexor is what finally did it for me, but everyone is different.
Once you get some semblance of stability back, you have to get professional counseling. As my high school girlfriend's mother put it, "it took years for you to get that way, it's going to take years for you to get out." It's true, and you can't do it alone. Get help so you can talk through what has happened to you and get yourself sorted out.
Take care of yourself my friend.
- Neil Wehneman
which a great deal of mine was, and I simply refer to
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Most posts discuss what happens to the data, and most mention porn, others mention software, ...etc.
...etc.). What about your emails that you meticulously kept for 10 or 15 years.
All that is good and all, but there is more than that. Think about your accounting records for example (Quicken, GnuCash,
That is the stuff on your computer. What about the stuff you put on the net in one form or another? For example that blog you setup? Or that web site?
Once you die, the PC eventually becomes obsolete or unusable. Chances are, your spouse of kids are not interested in what is the computer, and it is gone. Your web hosting account will probably be terminated due to non-payment.
Before archeology, our only sources of data on past civilizations was from historians. These were often porfessional people writing for posterity, and had some bias or other.
After archeology came into play in the 19th century, our knowledge of past civilization had a quantum leap, after we found fragments of daily life from average people (like you and me and him). Whether it was Greek ostraca, or baked clay tablets with list of goods, or pottery shards with writing practice in hieroglyphs.
Which brings me to the point of this post: the bigger picture, not individuals, or families, but societies and civilizations.
All this meta data about humanity in the last 2 decades of the 20th century, and the 21st century is on perishable and fragile media. It is even volatile (web hosting account?)
How would people several centuries from now view this entire civilization? How would they guage the reaction to say Sept 11, or invasion of Iraq? Would they see the US population as pro or anti war, or divided evenly? How would Bin Laden and Bush be assessed? Blair? Aznar? How would they get a glimpse into people's daily life.
Remember that as things are happening, it is easy to think that the information you gather on the event/person/concept are always clear and available. However, if you give it a decade or two, you yourself will not remember much details. How about people from a different culture/mindset/civilization/society? What would they think and how would they perceive you from the little they manage to recover?
The only hope here is the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org But will it endure? Is it enough?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
"As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
.. quite unexpectedly (it was my grandmother who was on the brink of death, who suddenly sprung back to life, only to have her love pass away during a routine mid-evening nap .. lifes funny sometimes.) Anyway, during the last couple years, he started handling all his finances, using quicken .. which, of course, was passworded. This caused a mild hassle - no one knew how much money, really, he had, and where the money was. My grandmother never handled the money, ever. Eventually the password _was_ 'cracked', but had it not, it would have caused some problems.
Being relatively young, I must say, "no I have not."
However, last year my grandfather had passed away
Basically, if you have important data on your HD that will be needed after you pass away, access to that data will need to be left behind - perhaps in your will, or with a trusted love one. It's ultimately the responsible thing to do.
Not that I'm unsympathetic, I've been through suicidal depression as well. But, you know, that didn't make me lose my taste in poetry :).
I try to be realistic with people when I recommend they see a doctor and start a serious treatment plan.
I guess you are right. I should have pointed that it was not like all my problems and the pain dissapeared in 24 hours... it happened, in fact, several days later. But one thing is for sure, and that is, in just one day I felt better... better than any other day in my life (put aside childhood), and many compulsive thoughts went away.
That brought hope to my life. And that's what I meant. If a person is considering commiting suicide, they should at least go to a doctor if they haven't already... come on... once you're dead, you won't come back. It's forever. So it's worth giving it a shot and trying to get treated medically.