Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Sibling: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Photos, Voice Notes and Creative Work

You’re the one managing things for your aging parent in Adelaide. Your sibling lives somewhere else — interstate, or just on the other side of the city — and between the two of you, you’re the one who knows where Mum’s photos actually live, that Dad’s poems are on the old iPad in the spare room, that the voice notes from your grandmother are in an iCloud account no one has logged into for years. If your parent loses capacity, or if something happens to you, your sibling needs to be able to find all of it without guessing.

The problem

When an older person loses capacity or dies, the family’s digital memory is usually the first thing to go missing. The phone PIN was never written down. The cloud account requires identity documents the family doesn’t have. The old laptop boots, but the user account is locked. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that a will deals with assets and executorship — it does not give your sibling the practical information they need to recover a photo library from a device they’ve never touched.

Digital legacy is also personal information under the Privacy Act 1988, including the personal information of every family member who appears in the photos, voice notes and messages. That means it needs to be handled deliberately — with consent on who receives it and clear instructions on what happens to it — not handed around as a pile of devices and password guesses.

For carers of aging parents, the window to capture this information is now, while your parent can still tell you where things are. Not later.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. For your parent’s digital legacy, the simplified version records: which devices hold what (the iPhone, the iPad in the spare room, the old MacBook), which cloud accounts the material lives in (iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, Facebook), who the nominated recovery contact is for each account, where physical backups sit (the external drive in the desk drawer), and your parent’s intended fate for each category — archive to family, publish, or delete.

It does NOT hold the phone PIN, the iCloud password, the recovery codes, or the device itself. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your parent’s passwords, not their device PINs, and not custody of the files. Your sibling sees only the digital legacy module you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve authorised release.

The boundary matters: because the vault holds instructions and not assets or credentials, it sits outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC reporting. It’s a simple subscription, not a regulated financial product.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent (or work from what you already know) and add each device and cloud account to the vault — what it is, where it physically lives, what’s on it, and your parent’s wishes for it.
  2. For each cloud account, you record the nominated recovery contact your parent has set up (Apple’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s memorialisation contact) so your sibling knows who the platform will release the account to.
  3. You name your sibling as the recipient for the digital legacy module and they accept — the vault records their consent under Australian Privacy Principle requirements for handling third-party personal information.
  4. If something happens to your parent — or to you — your sibling is notified per your release rules and sees only the digital legacy instructions, not your other modules.
  5. Your sibling uses the instructions to contact each platform’s bereavement or legacy process directly. The vault accelerates the finding step; the platforms still run their own identity checks.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families are often spread between the city, the Hills, and interstate — the carer is local, the sibling frequently isn’t. When a parent in Adelaide loses capacity suddenly, the sibling flying in from Melbourne or Perth has hours, not weeks, to understand a digital footprint they had no part in building. A written instruction set — what’s on which device, where the recovery contact sits, what your parent wanted kept versus deleted — is the difference between salvaging forty years of family photos and losing them to a locked iCloud account no one can recover.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Adelaide carers

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers of aging parents in Adelaide can register a first digital legacy module on behalf of a parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not the device PINs, not the cloud passwords, and not the files themselves.