Selfhosted

Years ago I recorded a video saying "if you watch this and I'm gone, you're fucked, export immediately right now all the passwords, photos and emails from the family cloud. Don't wait, do it immediately right now, without maintenance everything will break within 2 years at max. Watch the instructions at home.domain.com/emergency the instructions on how to do it. They will be probably be outdated because hopefully several decades are passed, so you might adapt them to the new version. If someone in the family has computer skills, in the disk you there's the ssh password for the home server"

Then I saved it on a DVD, I wrote on it "backup keys for the Bitcoin wallet" and hidden it in my drawer

My wife has a laminated card which has the instructions to my KeePass vault, and an explanation of how the backup drives are encrypted.

Once the family photos are safe and she can login to all my accounts to finalize them, the server can be replaced with a WRT54G for all I care. Continuity will be impossible. Even a qualified sysadmin would probably struggle with it.

Honestly, haven’t even though about it. Better make this my weekend project.

Someone mentioned having a static page with instructions (home.example.com/emergency or something similar) not a bad idea at all. Actually this might the route I take too. Thank you for talking about something I didn’t even know I needed!

Buy a small safe. Write all your relevant passwords in a book and keep it in the safe. Write a sealed will which gives the combinations for the safe and deposit the will with a lawyer or trustee. Give instruction to the lawyer to hand over the will to your family if you died.

There’s nothing on my systems that anyone else needs to survive. They can wipe the drives and run a bunch of web servers that only serve up hamsterdance in perpetuity for all I care.

If I did need something like that I’d program some kind of dead man’s switch to email instructions with a master password to a trusted party if I didn’t log on for 2 weeks or something. Then hope I never end up in a coma or otherwise incapacitated but not dead. There are 3rd parties that do that kind of thing but I wouldn’t trust them and would roll my own.

All of my passwords are in Bitwarden and important ones are shared with my wife who has her own Botwarden and has shared her important passwords back with me. If one of us goes, the other will have access to everything. I don't (yet) have any descendants to inherit anything of importance, so I'm not worried about anything beyond my passwords so that if something happens to me, my wife can manage all of the accounts for bills, banking, communication, etc.

If/when I have children, I will likely make a new plan that builds on what I already have, with directions to access my password vault that can be given to my brother and his husband and my parents, should they outlive me and my wife. With my passwords, everything else of import is accessible. Thankfully, my brother is very tech savvy, so if my wife and I both go, I can trust him to be able to log in to everything and pull important media down.

My wife and I share the same KeePass database for all of our passwords (synced across several devices via Syncthing).

Like me, she runs Fedora Silverblue and knows her way around a terminal well enough to follow instructions. I make a point to add verbose markdown notes to the vital KeePass entries; detailing how to decrypt the backup drives, restart services on our Proxmox server, etc. She also knows where the backup drives are located, both at home and off-site; and so does my son, in case anything happens to the both of us at once.

They might not be able to carry on exactly as things are now, but they'll definitely be able to maintain access to our family photos, financials, etc., and that's all that really matters.

I wasnt preparing for death, but trying to be ready in case I forget (which I do quite often). I made a book in bookstack with all steps I need to build that server from scratch together with all passwords, printed it on paper and stuck it next to a server

When I die, I will go to heaven. This isn't exactly the worst.

The server itself will remain quite stable for a long time.

The others won't be able to continue administrating/maintaining the server. They understand that, so they will probably copy all their files to their local devices, sooner or later, and stop using the other services.