My best friend died two years ago this month. I still miss him. But we had a mutual pact: a digital control
plan. A digital control plan is invoked
when someone is incapacitated or dies. A
surrogate takes over control of that person’s digital accounts, websites, blogs
and files.
I had a sealed envelope and an encrypted hard drive located
in my friend’s gun safe eight miles away from my home office. He had a sealed envelope located in my safe
in our garage.
I went to the safe the day after he died, sad as all get
out, and retrieved his envelope to hand over to his only child, a 40 year old son
I had known since age six.
My friend grew up with computers and the internet. He worked in Air Force intelligence and later
at the National Security Agency. He
taught me everything I know about computers and the internet up until the time
of this death. He helped me put together
my first computer from a Heath kit by instructing me over the telephone. He was very smart and talented in those
electronic ways.
So how can you benefit from best friend’s advice?
1.
Think about who will be your digital surrogate
and also have a backup digital surrogate.
Implement a joint plan.
2.
Confirm that the storage is secure and has very
limited access. Provide the same for
your surrogate.
3.
Ascertain a safe distance away from each
other. We thought eight miles was enough
distance since weather, fire, utility outage and civil disruption were not
major factors, in our opinion.
4.
Learn how to encrypt an external hard drive and use it
5.
Use a tamper revealing envelope
6.
Don’t forget to update your envelope contents as
often as you change master password(s) and you create/update the external hard
drive for offsite storage. Remember, the
bad guys force us to change our passwords a lot more frequently these days.
R.I.P. MSgt. Robert Lloyd, USAF Ret., 1944-2012
Added:
Don’t forget about cloud storage. I use SugarSync, and Box.com. Don’t be stuck with one provider. What happens if your sole provider goes down? Always have a backup.
