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Somewhere in the vastness of the Fediverse there must have been some discussions about digital legacy in recent days. I found traces of this discussion in well-known profiles, but also in unknown ones. I first noticed it, for example, in the feed of Andreas Bulling through a retoot. I have seen several threads on this topic that were running independently of each other. The Handelsblatt newspaper also had something about it. It seems to be a topic that is currently moving many people. Just today I had a discussion with my brother and his partner about the general topic of “preparing for death”. Where did that come from? No idea. The two of them are not on the Fediverse. The subject seems to be in the air. And I wonder why.

Well, I have two exhausting weeks behind me, so I have refrained from tracing the discussion back to its beginning to find out the “why”. But it seemed sensible to me to write down my experiences on the topic. Because: I stood in front of exactly this problem in September 2025. However, I had the advantage of knowing what was going to happen. It was not a sudden matter that entered my life in the form of an ambulance. On 29 September 2025 I had an “invitation” to the hospital for surgical repair of an aortic aneurysm. Ascending aorta extending far into the aortic arch. This is an operation that carries a certain mortality rate. I did not know about the magnitude of the operation before the anaesthesia, but even what I did know was big enough to be afraid of. The thought of my own mortality introduced itself and softly said, “Hello!”.

I do not want to write here about the topic of living wills and powers of attorney. About the considerations on the topic of “the world without me”. I have summarised a lot on this complex of topics in part 9 of “The Day My Heart Stood Still” in the section “Bumms – büst butten”.

Here I am focusing on a different small subarea. Or something that initially looked like a small subarea. How do I manage my digital legacy.

Disaster preparedness

I have a special relationship with the topic of disaster preparedness. In many areas, my professional work revolves around exactly that. I am somewhat tight-lipped about what I do professionally. That is intentional. Even people close to me never knew exactly. It is not a secret. It is just not my way to talk about it. It comes from the same corner as the point that I only write about other people in this blog in a very obfuscated way. They are not my stories to tell. But there is a very high probability that data that is important to you is processed on systems to which I have contributed my small share. And – this is why I am telling you – often with an eye for disaster. And that shapes you a little. As the saying goes: “It’s an occupational disease”. Like the railway workers of the Reichsbahn, who reportedly kicked their partners at night because they had to step on the safety switch of their locomotive all day long.

These are environments into which a great many thoughts have flowed: in particular “What actually happens if something here stops working?”. This led, in my case, to a particularly urgent awareness of the problem when the hospital invitation reached me: “Oh damn, I really have a problem in that corner”.

And to the experience that, if you leave gaps, it is in the nature of things that these will later come back to bite you. For example: “If you only write something down once on paper, it is guaranteed that this piece of paper will not be findable later.” And if that piece of paper happens to be the one with the password for the password manager, then all further planning is sound and smoke.

Admittedly

Even though I always had this awareness of the problem: the cobbler’s children have the worst shoes. It took the surgery as an occasion before I tackled this problem. And even today – eight months after the operation – all of this has not been fully and satisfactorily implemented.

Above all, it was one thing: too late. Really, you have to implement all of this as soon as people depend on you. And not just when you have your surgery appointment. A month is a very short time to deal with everything. And besides: the emergency physician’s car and the ambulance can suddenly appear at the door.

Paper

I digitise almost everything in my life. I take all the mail, every receipt, every piece of paper from the past week, and scan it once a week. I have been doing this for a long time. I do not pre-sort. I do not weed things out. Because it is hard to predict what is important.¹ Eleven years ago I bought my first semi-professional document scanner. The Fujitsu iX500. Meanwhile I am on the Ricoh iX2500 (the business with these scanners was sold off by Fujitsu), after a forgotten staple in the iX500 made sure that one page now has a thin black stripe running across the sheet, because the scan line now has a scratch.

By now, this archive – which goes back beyond my year of birth in the early 1970s² – contains several tens of thousands of documents. YES, some of them are receipts for a carton of milk and shower gel. Searchable with OCR. Tagged. Organised with DevonThink. Documents are easier to find here than in a wall of ring binders. Easier, not easy.

Structure

In DevonThink I have given this jumble of documents a structure: for example, all important documents are tagged with “(IMPORTANT)”. In addition, every important document has a descriptive tag that roughly categorises it: “(IMPORTANT) (life insurance)” for instance.

The problem is: it is my structure. Without instructions, anyone will find it hard to quickly locate a document there if they do not know a keyword or a word from the content. Sure, there are several words that you would try right away. Like “life insurance”. But then you also get all the bank statements with debits. You could essentially reconstruct my whole life from it. If you have the necessary time. If you have the necessary mental capacity.

What is important?

That is why, in the period before my operation, I wrote a kind of manual. A runbook for Jörg’s life. Which documents in this data collection are important and for what reason? There is an HTML page that links to all the important documents, with a description of why they are important and in which case they become important. This page lies on the system that contains all the scanned documents.

But it also expresses very simple things explicitly, such as the fact that important documents have the tag “(IMPORTANT)”. In a disaster situation, that is not necessarily a mental leap one is capable of. Just as in the stress of a disaster you may make mistakes at the console that you would otherwise never have made.

This document is also of significance for oneself: when you write down why a document is important, you think about whether it really is necessary. And not just ballast that overburdens those left behind.

Access

I have put all the important passwords into a separate password manager. In my password manager that I use day-to-day, so many passwords have accumulated over the years that it would have taken an outsider a long time to find the right one in each case. And anyway, not every account and every password needs to be handed over.

Retention

When choosing your data storage, please also bear in mind that modern data carriers do not necessarily retain their data permanently, especially when they are stored without power. The guaranteed durability of data on a poorly stored SSD is sometimes measured in months.

JEDEC JESD218 is a bitch – in this regard. In the worst case, an enterprise SSD only has to hold data for 3 months. A client SSD for one year. That is probably not a problem if, as a bereaved person, you need a document in the first few weeks. But imagine you need a document after 3 years. And in all likelihood that person, lacking awareness of the problem, will not have rewritten the SSD again.

My backup copy of this data is on a hard drive. Very classic. As ExFAT. Should be readable everywhere. Encrypted. The key documented on paper.

Time capsule

For this reason, there is a time capsule sitting on my desk. On it, my entire life is stored, encrypted. Everything you need in order to turn, in the event of my death, an unordered crash without a crash dump into an orderly shutdown is in this time capsule.

It is a Mac Mini. Originally it was intended for something else, but with the operation this function crystallised. My document archive is on it. Tax software. Password manager. Everything that is somehow of importance. I use the system regularly (for example, when I prepare my tax return), so the maximum retention period of data on a powerless medium is not a problem for me.

In addition, there are sealed envelopes in several places containing the credentials for this system. The passwords for several backup copies are also deposited there.

All the data is on this system. No further system is needed to gain access to it. No internet is needed. No active contracts are needed. You just need physical access to the system. And the credentials.

Star Wars

Of all things, Star Wars showed me one very important point. Or rather, the actress who played General Organa. Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher’s mother, died one day after her daughter. It is not enough to hand all of this over to just one person. Several people have to be in a position to shut down my life in an orderly fashion.

Did it work?

I do not know. I am writing this text. That means that in the worst case all of this did not have to be tested. And if it had had to be used, I would not have noticed it. I would not have had to write a text about it. However, if there is one thing I have learned in well over 30 years of professional practice: untested disaster preparedness is not disaster preparedness.

We simulated my death. Questions such as “Where actually are Jörg’s bank details?”, “Whom do you have to write to in order to get support from Jörg’s company?”, “What is that box in the basement blinking away there actually for?”.

The main problem was that some of the potential users had never used a Mac before and did not know programs such as DevonThink, for example. I solved this by giving the account with all this data on the time capsule system a wallpaper that listed which programs were used for what purpose. And how to search in them.

Here it was important to take some special circumstances into account: for about three years I have been solo. Otherwise too it is not the case that for over 30 years I have shared my life with someone who knows my life inside out and knows better than I do where I have put a document. That is just how it is. The tasks of clearing up my estate would probably have fallen to my father. So all these tasks would have had to be carried out by someone who, while computer-savvy, is over 80 and familiar with Windows but steadfastly refuses every attempt to migrate him to a Mac. Sometimes it is obvious to whom you hand all of this over. Sometimes more thought is required. That is the reason why I have also described my situation here so openly. Because I had to weigh many factors. Trust in a person, the ability to bear this task. In my case, it was several people in the end. The lesson of General Organa, after all.

This made clean documentation even more important.

Little things

Biometrics

I noticed many small things here. For example, that “Please enter the password to unlock TouchID” (or something similar). After that I thought: it is no use simply storing a second person’s face in the mobile phone or registering my brother’s finger on the laptop’s fingerprint sensor. If you are unlucky, the device is in a state that demands a password or PIN at exactly the moment you need it. Before that person can use their finger. And if you know the password, you no longer need the finger or the face. In addition: both work even before the inheritance situation has arisen. The sealed envelope at least makes that recognisable.

This additional finger can of course be useful if you have to quickly access someone’s mobile phone in hospital and the sealed envelope is at home. I therefore do not want to describe this practice as completely superfluous. But in my view, it is somewhat less useful than it appears at first. I have done without it.

Contracts

From my mailbox and my bank statements, you can deduce quite well which ongoing contracts I have entered into. But I tested deducing it myself once. It is time-consuming and requires concentration. Since I did not want to burden anyone with that, I have documented all contracts in a spreadsheet. In a format that practically anyone can open.

Calls

The list of contacts, too, is ultimately a digital legacy that needs to be curated. In my digital address book there are always also people with whom I no longer have any contact. I find it hard to delete them.³ But for a person who has to take care of my estate, it is hardly clear which contacts only have sentimental value.

There were therefore two lists of people who were to be informed of the outcome of the operation. A short list of those people who were to be informed immediately of a positive outcome. And then there were a few people from whom life has separated me, who were to be informed in the event that things went wrong. This list was longer.

Two people on the first list were colleagues: one was my boss, the other the works council representative I trust. On the one hand so that my colleagues would know, but also to open a path to my employer’s resources in the worst case. These colleagues knew how my employer provides support in such situations. I therefore did not have to document everything, but could rely on the fact that everything necessary would be communicated.

What remains?

There is one thing that I did not manage to do before my operation. It is the answer to the question: “When everything has been taken care of, the last contract cancelled, the last person informed, what is actually left of me?”

In St Paul’s Cathedral in London there is a very interesting inscription: “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice” – “Reader, if you seek a monument, look around you”. The sentence is on the gravestone of Christopher Wren, the architect of the cathedral.

Now, none of us is a Christopher Wren. None of us is a cathedral builder. And only a few are granted the privilege of creating something of lasting significance. What I create is, at the end of its depreciation period, electronic scrap and ends up with the waste disposal company. So after 5 years … plus or minus 2.

But we are remembered for what we have created in our lives. Our descendants. The lives we have influenced. In the old days there was the box with the grandparents’ letters, the book with the recipes. But our legacies are increasingly transient. They are digital. They do not fade with time. They simply disappear at some point.

We will at some point reach the moment when there are more dead people on Facebook than living users. However, I do not want to remain merely as a profile in memorial mode on a social network.

That is why I am currently working on a way to preserve this blog permanently. Even when the moment comes when everything is over for me. Not because the blog is objectively important. But because it is subjectively important to me. I have the advantage that my blog is statically generated. To put it like this: it is frugal. It does not eat much straw.

For this reason, I have ordered some space and a domain for it from a shared host. If I transfer a few hundred euros there at some point, the blog can simply continue to operate for many years before being deleted at the end of the money. There is an article stored in my blog that is automatically published if there has been no sign of life from me in the last 30 days⁴. This blog entry refers to that domain.

Maybe I will change the title: Reader, if you seek Jörg’s little sandcastle, look around you. Lector, si castellum eius harenarium requiris, circumspice.

Limits

I have not handed everything over: some things only made sense with my person. I centrally manage the home networks of relatives. Here the solution was very simple: not to hand it over, but to rely on the fact that, once I am no longer there, it will fall back into self-managed environments. It was unrealistic to hand the subtleties of the networks over to others. I am, after all, the fan of this central management. The handover of the technology was not the decisive thing, but explaining which contracts have to be cancelled so that everyone can go their own way.

In my view, some things should also be allowed to fall into oblivion. The encryption key of a personal diary, for example. If, throughout your life, you did not have the guts to say something to a person’s face, you do not have to give it to them to read afterwards. The key may well be lost.

And for the things that would still need to be said, if one does not quite have the status of the menthol cigarette man? For that there are, very classically, letters. On paper. Written with a fountain pen. Once again separately enclosed in the envelope with the passwords. Seems to me, in any case, more appropriate than handing over a USB stick. That is how I did it. However, I burned the letters a few months after the operation.

Not everything has to remain when you go. But you should make sure that not everything that remains is an inaccessible digital legacy.

Peace of mind

I already wrote it in the article “Bumms – büst butten”: when you have all of this in order, you go into such situations much more relaxed. You can focus on getting through it. That alone is exhausting enough. Even if you do not have to worry about other people. The knowledge of having everything halfway sorted out takes a load off you. You should do it for your own sake.

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