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?
Yeah, have a tech mate ready to step in, like a “porn buddy” https://youtube.com/shorts/kgu3PzpKhn4
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.
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 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.
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.
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 💩
Ha! Spell check fail
I’ve learned to wear brown pants so it’s not as bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You vastly overestimate boomers-era individuals (and really the entire general population). Beyond turning things on and ‘everything magically works’, most know fuck all about tech.
I know that if I croak tomorrow, while my ex partners and a couple friends would be able to piece together things, 1) they’d have to be informed that I’m dead, 2) they’d have to be asked to help with my different hosts, and 3) they’d need to remember where I physically put the password in case of emergency to access the main host (with all of the family’s important shit, like all of it). Assuming they got those three things done, they would have to convey to the ex/friend how to access the main node, and then figure out my password manager master password, and the mfa (multiple options), or assume it’s inaccessible and use the physical password to retrieve the data and restore… on an OS none of them has ever used before.
Assuming all that is doable, after the restore is to maintain the system and the containers, perpetually, as well as continue paying for the domains so they can access the services hosted on the nodes, and continue paying for my vps and the backup storage strategy (two different companies on two different continents alongside the local copy).
As I have literally almost died before (I was supposed to have died, according to doctors who saved me), I have tried to make this hypothetical situation easy, and still it would astonish me if they get past like step #2.
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
Since others were posting end of life style docs, here is another: https://www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.htm
That’s actually some good info there.
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
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 :)
This is one of the reasons why I don’t host other people’s data. I’d consider this option if there was another technical person among users with whom I could share workload and risks like a sudden death.
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
If?
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
I suppose you could add the qualifier “unexpectedly”
