What Happens To Your Data When You Die? 628
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?"
It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:5, Insightful)
Timothy Leary [leary.com] is another good example of dedicated fans who keep the site running after he died and an even better example is Peter McWilliams [mcwilliams.com] 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 [mcwilliams.com].
Frankly as far as data and death are concerned most of you
Wills are great (Score:5, Insightful)
Not my data, but work's... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Not just death... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Will (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:2, Insightful)
Why Would You Care? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is one group that would care, and that are future historians trying to understand us. All the written letters, document, newspapers, records of various sorts are what the historians have to work with. Future historians may in some sense have less to work with due to problems preserving digital data.
sign copylefts to FSF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:software (Score:2, Insightful)
Put them in your will (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Work vs Personal (Score:2, Insightful)
When my uncle [slashdot.org] 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 :)
DoggRe:How about... (Score:1, Insightful)
I know /. is predominantly Atheist, but imagine if there was an afterlife; You'd be looking down saying "Don't delete that you git, I spend many hours of my recently ended life writing that!"
My father's data (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
A safety deposit box can useful for such things, or even just a friend. He keeps yours, you keep his. The meatspace version of posting it to an ftp site and letting everyone mirror it. Hey, maybe he's got some pr0n you haven't seen yet.
Keeping duplicates of such records in storage is also one of the traditional roles of the family lawyer, if anyone out there is still so quaint as to have one of those. If not maybe you should think about getting one, because he's going to be the guy who takes care of your will.
Papers, passwords (in a sealed envelope to be opened in the event of your death), etc go to your lawyer. You also designate an executor. That's the family member/friend you wish to see carry out the provisions of your will. The executor gets the envelope of passwords and instructions for what to do with them from the lawyer, and carries them out.
It's really all fairly standard stuff. The inclusion of computer files doesn't alter things at all really. People have been dying for years.
KFG
Don't Care. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrongo. Example:
When I was eight years old, my mother died. Many years later, I began to wonder what kind of a person my mother was. Oh, I have memories of her, but they are the memories of a child. I know little about what made her a full-dimensional person. What her politics were, for example. Or what kind of music she liked, etc.
My mother was a prolific letter-writer. She was from a fairly poor family, and considered a long-distance phone call a luxury to be reserved for birthdays and holidays. Consequently, she wrote many letters to her mother, even up until her last days. Unfortunately, few of her letters survived her. My sisters and I eventually found ten or twenty of them, but I would give anything if her mother and my father had kept more of the letters.
Yes, nobody will probably care about your extensive pr0n collection, or that flamefest you got sucked into on comp.windows.lusers, but much of the data that you consider to unimportant now might become priceless after you're gone... at least to the people who care about you.
So save your e-mail (not the SPAM). Keep backups of your weblogs. Hell, make hardcopies and save them in a notebook. These things say more about you than you might realize, and somebody might someday be glad you kept them.
Re:Dead man's handle (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Re:Dead man's handle (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:3, Insightful)
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
There must be more to life than this. (I hope!) (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:2, Insightful)
Scuse the stream-of-consciousness... and the anonymous. Slashdot doesn't seem quite like the place to get candid about depression whilst logged in.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Passing things on... (Score:2, Insightful)
Would be pretty cool, unless you were a troll.
Hardcopy (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely! If you want to write the source material for historians 100-150 years from now, use pigment-based ink on acid-free paper. Send letters, not e-mail. Send them to friends and relatives that will keep them in old trunks in the attic. If you write a book, donate well-bound copies to your university library. If you publish in magazines, archive high-quality paper proofs of the articles. For still images, black-and-white silver-based negatives, with prints properly done on acid-free paper. There are no good choices for movies and videos. There are no 100-year digital media yet, and if you depend on people to copy from medium to medium and convert from format to format, the chances that no one will slip up over 100 years is darned close to zero.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there is the Internet Archive... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [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 [archive.org], 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.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Not a bad idea to let someone else in (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust transcends death (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:2, Insightful)
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!!!!).
Re:beating depression (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure it doesn't always work, but it still works some of the days.
Re:me too (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Bigger Picture: Human History and Civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:1, Insightful)
Just tell someone. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Will (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a will, and as it happens my oly real asset is my car. That goes to my parents, and if they'e not available, to my brother's family. Lucky for me my dad is a trust officer so getting the work done professionally was cheap and fast. I didn't even have to pay a notary fee as his secretary did the job for free. As simple as it was, we did it by the book. My family's non-vicious, settling my estate would probably be very easy.
But how many families fly at each other's throats, just to get some damn lamp from grandma, just so Cousin Louise who-was-always-a-bitch-and-really-didn't-like-Gra
Getting back to the "being of sound mind" bit, how will the courts know that you were of sound mind and not under any undue influence? They can't take your word for it. Get a notary and independent witnesses.
BTW, Edgar Allen Poe's will contained three words, "All to mother." It was challenged but it stood up. It isn't always that easy.
I guess this isn't really a lawyer friendly board, but a few bucks spent on good estate planning could be a reason to feed the legal monster a small snack. It could keep family from humiliating themselves and spending your whole estate on the law-jackals.
IANAL-or-a-TO. duh!
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:1, Insightful)
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 :).
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:3, Insightful)
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.