Have you thought about what happens to your life online if you or a loved one passes away…

Like it or not, more and more of our lives are being lived and stored online, with banking online, shopping, social media and email.

But… what happens when you don’t leave the relevant information to access all the personal digital information and assets when you die?

You need to ensure you leave the relevant information for your loved one or an executor otherwise your digital life may well be mishandled or lost to the ether.

Consider all the websites you use on a weekly/monthly basis that require your log-in details.  Who might need access to this information, even if it is to enable that person to close accounts down or transfer important information, enable your nominee access to a home pc, laptop or tablet for instance.  Once you have a list – you need to decide how you want your digital life to be managed and by who, once you are no longer able to do so…

There are various ways to do this:

You may find that writing down your log-in details to various accounts, including your username and password, together with the answers to your security questions.  This could then be placed in a sealed envelope and addressed to your named executor.  This would be kept alongside your will.  Although DO NOT include these details within your Will – as it could become a public document after death.

There are also a number of online password management services where you can store your passwords, again you would need to provide your executor with the details of how to access that account or again leave a note in a sealed envelope with your Will.

A few of us at PSP use KeePass to store all important password information, this is a free download to your laptop or storage system:

‘KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).’

Copyright © 2003-2015 Dominik Reichl

For further information click on the following link:  http://keepass.info/

Another question to ask yourself in relation to KeePass is ‘what if your pc, laptop or tablet is lost or stolen’…
The way ahead is to use something like Jungledisk or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), where for a nominal amount each month, your digital presence is kept safe.

‘We keep your files secure. Unlike other services that routinely unlock your files to parse them and save server space, Jungle Disk has you generate an encryption key that you keep. Unless you give us access, we can’t see your data—and neither can anyone else.’

©2014 Rackspace, US Inc.

For further information click on the following link:  https://www.jungledisk.com/

‘Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you pay only for the storage you actually use. There is no minimum fee and no setup cost.’

© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.

For further information click on the following link:  http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

No one likes to talk about dying, but try to take on board ‘what if’, think about those you leave behind…. as it is truly devastating losing a loved one and when you are the one left behind, try to deal with the loss – you do not want the heart ache of potentially losing your loved ones digital presence or the grief it could entail in trying to access accounts.