Data Recovery in the event of your Death

"It's a scary thought. Computers have completely usurped pencil and paper. We all store our precious family pictures and important data on our computers and some of us go the extra step of securing this data from prying eyes through encryption, obscurity or at least strong passwords. Some of us manage data for others, too. Say you manage servers or websites. Would your family be able to get data to clients? Would they even know where it existed on your machine? Would your family know that as a webmaster there are many memberships you belong to or forums, chat groups, etc? Would your family be able to tell which of the 5 versions of patches and upgrades you have stored in each project's sub-directory was current or even applied?

"As I age (40-something) I begin to consider the difficulties my own family would have in the event of my death. Ours is a typical household in that all Mumma and the kids want to do is happily compute and not bother with the details. Sure, it kills me a little but I accept it and we're all better for it ;) However, in our case we have maybe 15 years of data stored on various devices and media and sometimes it's encrypted. At the very least some data is archived and password protected, even on the cds I burned it to. Speaking of cds, would your family know that the expected life of a cdrom is ~ 10 years?"

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