Deal with Other Digital Data

The previous several chapters detailed how to deal with major categories of digital data, such as photos, accounts, email, and social media. This chapter is about everything else—all the other bits (see Inventory Your Digital Assets) for which you should record your wishes.

Although these topics aren’t long or complex, they’re no less crucial than those I covered earlier. For example, they include all the miscellaneous files and software on your computer, as well as data you’ve stored in cloud services such as Google Docs and Dropbox. This chap­ter also covers how to handle backups and archives of your data, whether you’ve stored them on hard drives or optical discs, in the cloud, or in some other way.

Handle Your Media

In Inventory Your Media, I asked you to list your audio and video media and ebooks, divided into that which you’ve purchased and that which you obtained in other ways.

Media you didn’t purchase (and that, presumably, has no DRM protections) can be distributed in almost any way you choose; simply record your wishes in your digital will. Keep in mind, however, that unless you created it yourself, even DRM-free media is subject to copyright laws, and therefore should not be passed on to more than one person.

But, as I explained in An Aside: Digital Media Complications, leaving purchased media to anyone is potentially problematic:

• Unlike photographs and other digital documents that can be copied and passed on to multiple people, DRM-protected media can, at best, be passed on to one person.
• To play media protected by DRM, the other person will need your account credentials, which may prove inconvenient; and even then, there are various circumstances under which the provider could cut off access to the media.
• Although DRM is less often applied to purchased music than to video, the practice varies by provider.
• Any media you pay to stream (such as Netflix videos or Apple Music) will stop being available when your account is closed, so you shouldn’t consider it an asset at all.
• Although a relative or friend might appreciate having access to your purchased media, it won’t have the same sort of sentimental or historical value as your other data, because it’s not unique—anyone can purchase the same media you did.

For these reasons, whatever choices you make regarding your purchased media, you should do so recognizing that it may be beyond the technological capabilities or legal authority of your digital executor and beneficiaries to carry out your wishes precisely. That said, your major options are as follows:

• Destroy it. If you don’t want anyone to have to deal with the potential ramifications of copyright and DRM, you could write off all that media and ask your digital executor to erase the files.
• Leave it all to one person. If a particular beneficiary seems to be a good recipient of your purchased media, state that person’s name and exactly what items you want them to have. Your digital executor will need to figure out how to transfer the necessary files (on an external hard drive, for example). Be sure to include in this portion of your digital will the username(s) and password(s) applicable to the account(s) where the media was purchased, and mention any software that may be needed to play the files.

• Pass the buck. If you’re unable to decide what to do, or if you can’t be bothered to think through all the complexities involved, you can ask your digital executor to make decisions about your purchased media on your behalf. Between now and then, changes in technology or the law may affect the ways in which your media can be handled, and if your digital executor is willing to take on the responsibility of figuring it out, this is not a terrible choice!

Handle Your Software

As I noted in Inventory Software, your digital will should list the apps that will be needed to open your important files (to facilitate the pro­cess of archiving your data, if applicable), those that require subscriptions (so they can be cancelled), and those you would like to bequeath to someone else. Because the first two categories are self-explanatory, the only thing you should need to add to your digital will is who is to be the recipient of any software you intend to pass on.

Handle Digital Currency

If you own any bitcoins or other digital currency (see Inventory Digital Currency), remember that this is actual money—as valuable as dollars, euros, or yen, just in a different form. You can leave it to anyone you like, as long as your digital will specifies in detail how to access the money. But note that, as a tangible asset, it will be subject to taxes, and that either you or your digital executor will need to discuss the details with the executor of your conventional will.

Handle Other Cloud Data

Among the accounts you noted earlier (in Inventory Online Accounts and Highlight Key Accounts) are some containing data that doesn’t also appear on your computer or elsewhere in your digital archive. In addition, some of these accounts may do more than just hold data; they may make that data available to other people, for instance.

In any case, you’ll need to state in your digital will, for each account, both what should happen to the online data and what should happen to the account itself.

Your choices for the online data include:

• Download it and add it to your digital archive.
• Erase it from the cloud.
• Transfer the files to someone else.

And, for the accounts themselves, your options include:

• Shut down the account.
• Have your digital executor keep it going for a while.
• Transfer ownership of the account to someone else.

Since these options may sound a bit abstract, let me give you a few concrete examples:

• Dropbox: In most cases, the files in your Dropbox account are also synced to your computer, so they’ll appear in your digital archives without further effort. However, if you’ve shared certain folders with other people and your digital executor shuts down your entire account, those other people may lose access to the shared files. If that could pose problems, spell out your wishes—for example, have your digital executor inform a specified list of people that they must make copies of any shared files they want to keep within 30 days, after which the account will be deleted.

• Your Web site(s) and domain(s): If you have your own Web site (or more than one!), the HTML documents, images, and supporting files should probably be downloaded and added to your digital archive in case someone wants to see them in the future. But if the site is to remain online, someone else must be given the credentials to access it (and must take over paying for the Web hosting account, too). If you own domain names, the same applies to them; and, if you purchased them from a registrar other than your Web host, you should include the registrar’s name and instructions for how you want the domain names to be handled.
• Your medical records: If your health provider offers online access to your medical records, you may want to request that your digital executor download all the files and then instruct the provider to close your account.

• Instant messaging histories: Some instant messaging services, such as Apple’s iMessage, store histories of your conversations online. Those histories are most likely synced to your computer as well (and indeed, sometimes they’re accessible only in an app on a computer or mobile device, not in a Web browser). But if you have any accounts with services that store instant messages online—and you want to preserve those messages—be sure to note your wishes.
• Ebooks that use DRM: Most ebooks sold by Amazon, Apple’s iBooks Store, and similar vendors use DRM. Even if you’ve downloaded the books and stored them in an app, on a Kindle reader, or on another device, it’s both technically and legally iffy that you’ll be able to transfer them to someone else. In other words, ebooks protected by DRM are much like downloaded videos, and all the same caveats apply (refer back to Handle Your Media).

  On the other hand, ebooks you download in PDF format (including this one—if you aren’t reading this ebook in PDF format, see Ebook Extras to learn how to download a PDF version) aren’t copy protected and can be transferred just like any other file, as I discuss in the next topic.

Handle Other Local Data

Earlier, in Inventory Other Personal Data, I asked you to create a list of the major types of miscellaneous files on your com­puter and where to find them. Of the items on that list, you already should have recorded your wishes for email (in Deal with Email) and your audio and video media (in Handle Your Media). Now you need to specify what to do with your other files—including your photo library.

If, like me, you have hundreds of thousands of personal files on your computer, the whole notion of going through your inventory—even by broad categories—and specifying your wishes individually is probably both daunting and pointless.

So, in the interest of keeping things simple, I suggest that you assume all your photos and miscellaneous files will be kept and passed on to your heirs (the mechanics of which I cover in the next chapter, Preserve Your Data for Posterity), and simply make a list of any items or categories that you want your digital executor to delete, omit from your archive, or distribute to certain people. For example:

• Academic or professional research: If you have files representing work you did for school or business that may prove useful to a colleague, a university, or some other entity, specify which ones those are and how they’re to be distributed.
• Personal memorabilia: Perhaps your computer contains letters, photos, historical documents, genealogical data, or other personal bits that certain family members would especially appreciate see­ing. Be sure to specify what goes to whom. On the other hand, if you have love letters to or from someone your spouse would just as soon forget—or other documents that you consider embarrassing or sensitive, you may ask your digital executor to omit them from your archive and delete the originals.
• DRM-free ebooks: If you have any ebooks in PDF format (or otherwise lacking copy protection) that you want to leave to a particular person, make a note of them.
• Other people’s archives: As I mentioned in the sidebar Including Someone Else’s Digital Legacy in Yours, if someone else has entrusted you with their digital legacy, all that person’s digital files should be subsumed into your own archive, so that they’ll be pre­served and passed on properly. But you should still call attention to those files so your executor knows what you have and whether anyone else in particular will need access to it.

As I say, these are merely examples, but my point is that you shouldn’t devote days of your life to spelling out your wishes. Just hit the highlights of anything to which you want to give special treatment.

Handle Backups

I hope you’ve been religiously backing up your computer for years, and that you’ll continue doing so as long as you’re alive. (If not, see my recommendations in Back Up Digitized Files, which apply to every­thing on your computer—not just files you’ve recently scanned.) The question is what should happen to those backups once you’re gone.

In the next chapter, you (or your digital executor, or both) will be transferring the majority of data from your computer to archival media. And, in theory, that should be that; after you’re dead, those archives should take over the function that backups currently serve. However, because I’ve seen enough things go wrong with computers and backups I believe that an extra backup never hurts.

My suggestion is that, in your digital will, you instruct your digital executor to do the following:

• Turn off your backup software so there’s no risk that it will accidentally overwrite or delete files already in your backups.
• For backups stored locally (for example, on external hard drives), disconnect the media and store it in a safe place—at least until the final archives have been created, copied, and verified.
• If you use an online backup service, such as Backblaze or CrashPlan, keep the service active until the archives are complete. If online backups are your only backup, and the service you use offers the option to have your backups returned on a hard disk or flash drive (as Backblaze does), do that.