Digital Legacy Checklist: Six Settings and One Sheet of Paper

Most of what your family will need after you die is already on your phone, behind a password only you know. An afternoon of settings now saves them a letter to a corporation, a wait of weeks, and an answer that may be no. Here is the short list: name an Apple Legacy Contact, switch on Google's Inactive Account Manager, give your password manager an emergency route, and leave one printed sheet saying where all of it is.

What to have open before you begin

• In front of you: your phone, a laptop, a printer if you have one, and the name of one person for each account.
• Roughly: twenty minutes for the settings, and a second sitting for the sheet of paper.
• Do not put passwords in an email, a text message or a will. A will can become a public document in probate, and an email is one breach away from being read by a stranger.

Menus move, and the rules are different in different countries. Check each provider's current help page as you go, and treat this as orientation rather than instruction. Nothing here is legal advice. For a will, an estate, or a dispute between relatives, you want an estate attorney or solicitor.

The short version, if you only read one paragraph

Choose one person who is likely to outlive you and is good at admin. Add them at Apple, add them at Google, and give them a route into your password manager. Print the keys. Write one page. Tell them the page exists. Those four acts close the three gaps families actually hit.

Step one: choose the person, then say so out loud

Pick somebody organised who will share with the rest of the family rather than sit on it. An adult child or a steady friend is the usual answer. You can name several people at Apple, but the Apple Support page on Legacy Contacts is clear that any one of them can act alone on your account data, up to and including deleting it permanently. That is a reason to name carefully, not a reason to stall. Then tell the person. A legacy contact who learns about it from a lawyer has been given a surprise, not a role.

Step two: add your Apple Legacy Contact

The setting lives in your Apple Account settings under Legacy Contact. The person you name does not need an Apple device or an Apple Account of their own. What they will need, after your death, is the access key the setting generates and a copy of your death certificate. Apple offers to send the key by message or to print it. Print it, and keep the printout with your estate papers, because a message thread is the least durable place you could choose.

Know what the key does not open. A legacy contact can reach photos, messages, notes and files. Films, music and books you bought, your subscriptions, and your saved passwords and payment cards in iCloud Keychain are outside it. There is more on what the request looks like from the other side in our walkthrough of the Apple legacy contact request.

One more thing in the same settings area. If you use Advanced Data Protection, your own trusted devices hold the encryption keys, and Apple's page on that feature lists iCloud Backup, Photos and Notes among the twenty-five data categories it covers (Apple Support). It is a strong privacy choice and it moves the responsibility to you. Store any recovery key on the printed sheet, and read Apple's current pages on how a recovery contact and a legacy contact differ before you rely on either.

Step three: switch on Google's Inactive Account Manager

Open the Inactive Account Manager page in your Google Account. You set how long the account must go untouched before Google acts, then name up to ten people and decide what each of them may receive, which can be everything or only Google Photos. Google's help page says each trusted contact gets a list of the data types you chose plus a download link, with a phone-number check in front of the download (Google Account Help).

Do this because the alternative is a queue. Google states that it cannot provide passwords or other login details, and that any decision about a dead person's account comes after a careful review with no promised outcome. If your family has the download link, they do not need the review. Our guide to a parent's Google Photos and iCloud after a death covers the slow route, if you ever need it.

Step four: the accounts with no setting at all

This is the part most checklists skip, and it is the part that bites. Microsoft offers nothing comparable. Its own bereavement page tells survivors they "don't need to contact us" about a death, and says Microsoft must be served with a valid subpoena or court order before it will even consider releasing a dead person's information. The same page says an account with no activity closes automatically after two years, and that Outlook.com and OneDrive are frozen after one year, with the mail and files deleted shortly after (Microsoft Support).

Read that timing again, because it is the real deadline on this page. For a Microsoft account, nobody is reviewing anything and nothing is being held for your family. The files simply age out. The only workable plan for a service like this is that somebody you trust can already sign in, which is what step five is for.

Step five: give your password manager an emergency route

Both of the main managers have a feature for this and neither switches itself on. Bitwarden's Emergency Access lets you name trusted contacts and choose what they get: View, which is read-only across your personal vault, or Takeover, which has them set a new master password and gives them permanent read and write access, removing your two-step login in the process. You set a wait time, and you can approve a request yourself at any point before it elapses. The account holder needs a premium or paid organisation plan; the contact can be on a free account (Bitwarden Help).

1Password approaches it on paper instead. Its Emergency Kit is a printable PDF carrying your sign-in address, your email address, your Secret Key and a setup code, with a blank line where you write your account password by hand. 1Password's own advice is to print it, keep it with documents like a passport or birth certificate or in a safe deposit box, and give a copy to someone you trust, such as a spouse or a person named in your will. If you want the longer version of this step, we wrote it up as emergency access for your family.

Step six: the sheet of paper

One side of A4, written by hand if you prefer. It does not hold a single password. It holds directions.

1. Which services hold the photographs, the voice notes and the documents that matter.
2. The name and phone number of the person you named at Apple, at Google, and in your password manager.
3. Where the printed Apple access key is kept.
4. Where the password manager emergency kit or recovery sheet is kept.
5. Which drawer or cupboard the external drives and old phones are in.
6. The date you last checked that all of the above is still true.

Keep it with your estate papers, and make sure one living person knows the drawer. Then put a note in next year's calendar to read it again. People move, marry, fall out and die out of order, and a sheet that was accurate in October stops being accurate quietly.

When you get stuck

There is nobody obvious to name

Name the least bad option today and change it later. Every one of these settings is editable for as long as you are alive. An imperfect contact in place beats a perfect one you are still thinking about in four years.

The family does not speak to each other

Name the person you trust with these particular photographs, not the person whose feelings will be hurt least. Say so plainly while you can, and put the wider question of who inherits what to a solicitor, where it belongs.

You want to leave more than files

Settings keep a door open; they do not say anything. If you want words as well, there is recording messages for milestones you will not see, and the older tradition of writing down what you value rather than what you own.

The item most checklists get wrong

Almost every digital legacy checklist starts with an inventory. List every account you have, decide what should happen to each one, store the list somewhere safe. It looks thorough and it is mostly wasted effort, for a reason the Microsoft page above makes obvious: for a large share of services there is no setting to point an inventory at. A complete list of accounts is then a complete list of things your family cannot act on, which is worse than nothing because it reads like a plan.

Our order of priority is the opposite. Do the settings that create a sanctioned route first, because those are the only entries on the list that change what happens. Then write the one page, which is an index rather than an inventory, and which stays accurate for years because it names people and places instead of services. Skip the spreadsheet entirely. It goes stale within months, it tempts people into writing passwords down in the wrong place, and the week it is needed nobody can find the current version.

A bigger estate changes this: if you run a business, hold domain names, or keep assets of any size in your own name online, then the inventory genuinely is the work, and it belongs in front of an estate professional rather than in a document you maintain alone. The same goes if you are the only person who can keep a family business running. For an ordinary household of photographs, email and a streaming subscription, six settings and one sheet of paper is the whole job.

Where the photographs end up living

A legacy contact gets your family through a door. It does not tell anyone which of forty thousand photographs mattered, or who the woman at the back is. That part only exists if somebody writes it down while the people who know are still here. Glow keeps photographs, recordings and the family's own captions in one private place that relatives can add to, including the ones who will never sign up for anything. It holds only what the family actually recorded, and it will never generate a voice.

Questions families ask before they start

Can my legacy contact read my messages now?

No. The access key does nothing while you are alive. A request only works after your death, with the key and a death certificate, and you can remove the person at any time before then.

Can I change who I named?

Yes, at both Apple and Google, as often as you like. If you replace an Apple contact, generate a fresh access key and destroy the old printout, because the old one is the thing you would least like left in a drawer.

What about everything that is not Apple or Google?

Search the provider's help pages for a deceased-account or memorialisation route, and assume there is not one until you find it. Where there is no route, the plan is a password manager and a trusted person, and the sheet of paper that points at both.

Is it grim to set this up?

It is admin, and it is the kind that other people do on your behalf if you leave it. Twenty minutes while you are well is a smaller thing to ask of yourself than six weeks of correspondence is to ask of your children.