Digital wills

On eldavojohn’s Slashdot journal, Do You Have a Digital Will & Binary Testament?:

What am I going to pass on to my children? I have no childhood toys that aren’t rusted and broken in a machine shed. But I do have accounts to games like Warcraft III, SWG, WoW etc. that I have put many hours into. Further more; there are websites like HSX, MySpace, Flickr and even Slashdot where I have accounts with a lot of information about me. On top of that, what of my three or four free/academic e-mail accounts that I heavily use? Will I go through and delete selected e-mails or will I leave the access information to my family uncensored when I die?

Aren’t these e-mails like correspondences of dead relatives except they won’t be lost in a fire or flood? Wouldn’t a Flickr account be like a photo album that you didn’t have to fight siblings for? Isn’t my WoW account much like the rifle that my dad passed on to me when I was a kid? …

The games we play, the electronic trails we leave … those things will most certainly persist–considering the redundant array of indexed disks that servers use, possibly indefinitely. Will you pass them on to your children? Will it be easier for your life’s work to be cumulatively added to a family digital history book? Will my great great great grandson one day have access to the plain old java objects that at a young age set me on my life long profession? Will his eyes one day read this journal entry?

Do you have a digital will and binary testament with all your access information to personal accounts for your love ones to cherish after you pass? Could there be anything greater that would help your memory persist?

Hmm, he has a really good point. All of my online/digital information is scattered across a variety of locations, with a smorgasbord of usernames and passwords. And most of my journals are stashed in a haphazard manner in a directory on my laptop (and now that my laptop’s toast, a DVD backup). If I were to die suddenly, it would all be inaccessible, lost to the world (and, more importantly, to my posterity, assuming I don’t die before I get married :)). I love this idea of a “digital will and binary testament,” and so it’s time to create my own. And hopefully in the process I’ll get things organized. :)

Regarding eldavojohn’s post, this showed up on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to:

I’ve picked up a new hobby of hard binding books by hand. When I’ve got enough material ready to bind on my computer, I lump it into a single file and organize it using OpenOffice. Then I save it to a pdf. After that, I use KPDF (and some print filters) to print it as several PDF files organized as the “signatures” of a book. Then when I’m ready to bind it as a book, I print out the signatures to hard copy and bind up the book. Electronic formats come and go and are still in a very high state of flux. Books have been around for centuries and will last for a few more centuries still. I find that this is the best way for me to preserve my electronic artifacts. Plus, if it is done the right way, it only costs a little for all of the materials involved–including the glue and equipment.

I really like the idea of duplicating the electronic data (as much as possible — the stuff that matters, really) in hardcopy. For example, I’ve taken my mission e-mails home and printed them as a book (I’ve done the first of two volumes), and I plan to do the same with my mission journals (so I’ll have the handwritten originals and the printed copies), and eventually with all my journals. I figure that if I have 600 books on my shelves, I certainly have room for hard copies of my journals, which are irreplaceable. Ideally one would have hard copies of everything and online/digital copies of everything, so that you’re protected against any disaster. But that’s an ideal that’s hard to achieve (let alone maintain).