Digital Legacy

When someone you love dies, their digital world doesn't disappear — their photos, emails, voicemails, and social accounts are still out there, waiting. This is your practical guide to finding, saving, and protecting that data: how to request access, what each platform actually allows, and which steps to take first.

• Digital Legacy: A Guide for Families, From Locked Phones to Saved Voices — What a digital legacy holds, the official routes Apple, Google, Microsoft and password managers allow, and how to save the meaning behind the files as well as the files.
• Before Anything Happens: Sorting Out a Parent's Accounts and Digital Wishes — While everyone is well, list a parent's accounts, set up Apple, Google and Facebook's own access tools, ask what they want done with each, and give the photos a home - no shared passwords needed.
• What Is a Digital Legacy? Five Things People Believe, and What the Providers Actually Say — A digital legacy is every account, photograph, message and recording a person leaves behind. Five common beliefs about it, checked against Apple's and Google's own help pages.
• A Parent's Google Photos and iCloud After They Die: What You Can Actually Get — Whether you can reach a parent's cloud photographs depends on a setting they chose years ago. Here is each company's sanctioned route, the deadlines nobody warns you about, and what to do first.
• Digital Legacy Checklist: Six Settings and One Sheet of Paper — A digital legacy checklist you can finish in one sitting: the Apple and Google settings that create a sanctioned route, the services that offer none, and the single page that tells your family where to look.
• How to Save a Parent's Voicemails After They Die, Before the Line Closes — A short message can hold the last of a voice. Here is how to get one off a handset and into a file you own, and why the carrier's deletion date matters more than the phone.
• Getting Into a Parent's Phone After They Die: What Works, and What to Save First — The handset is rarely the way in. Here is what Apple and Google will actually do, which copies to hunt for first, and the one mistake that destroys everything.
• Five Phones, One Life: How to Gather a Parent's Photos From the Whole Family — Your mother's pictures are scattered across six pockets and a biscuit tin. Here is a calm way to pull them into one place, with a named keeper and a copy you own.
• How to Save WhatsApp Voice Notes From Someone You Love, Before They're Lost — A calm, step-by-step guide to saving WhatsApp voice notes from someone you love - before a reset phone or deleted chat takes their voice away forever.
• Apple Legacy Contact: How to Set It Up, and How to Use It After a Death — If someone named you as their Apple Legacy Contact, you can reach their iCloud photos, messages and files with the access key and a death certificate. Here is every step, what's included, and what to do if they never set one up.
• What Happens to a Facebook Account When Someone Dies — and How to Memorialize or Download It — When someone dies, their Facebook account can be memorialized, removed, or - if they set up a legacy contact - downloaded. Here's how to do each one without the password.
• How to Save a Loved One's Photos, Messages, and Voicemails After They Die — The official, safe routes to save a loved one's photos, messages, and voicemails after they die - no passwords required.