Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Sibling: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Mum and Dad’s Photos, Videos and Voice Notes

You’re the one in Perth who drives Mum to her appointments and helps Dad with the iPad when the password screen confuses him. Your sister lives in Melbourne. Between you, you’ve quietly agreed that when the time comes, she’ll be the one who sorts out the photos — forty years of family pictures on Dad’s phone, Mum’s voice notes to the grandkids, the slideshow Dad made for their fiftieth. The plan is to leave your sister a clear list of where all of it lives and who the recovery contact is, without ever handing over a PIN.

The problem

When an older parent loses capacity or passes away, the digital memory often disappears before anyone notices. The phone locks after a few failed attempts. The cloud account requires identity documents the family can’t produce quickly. The recovery email goes to an address only the deceased used. Apple, Google and Meta each have their own process for releasing a deceased person’s data, and each requires evidence and patience the family doesn’t have in the first weeks.

Your sister doesn’t need your parents’ passwords. She needs to know: which devices hold what (Dad’s iPhone, Mum’s old iPad, the laptop in the spare room), which cloud accounts back them up, who’s named as the legacy or recovery contact on each, and what your parents actually want done with it all — archive to the grandchildren, keep private, delete the social media. Without that map, a lifetime of photos goes into a locked phone in a drawer and stays there.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per digital asset: the device or platform (Dad’s iPhone, Mum’s Google Photos, the family Dropbox), the account identifier or email associated with it, whether a legacy contact or recovery contact has been set up at the platform level, and your parents’ wishes for what should happen to it — preserve for family, hand to a specific grandchild, delete.

It does NOT hold the device PIN, the iCloud password, the Google account password, or any other credential. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not the passcodes, not the recovery codes, not the device itself. Your sister sees only the digital legacy module you’ve prepared for her, only when you’ve released it.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting.

How it works

  1. You walk through your parents’ digital life with them — phone, tablet, laptop, email, social media, photo backups — and record each one in your vault as a separate entry.
  2. For each entry, you record the platform, the account email, whether a legacy/recovery contact has been set on the platform itself (Apple’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s memorialisation contact), and your parents’ stated wishes.
  3. You name your sister as the recipient for the digital legacy module and she accepts (the vault records her consent).
  4. When the trigger event arrives — capacity loss, hospitalisation, death — your sister is notified per your release rules and sees only the digital legacy instructions. Other modules stay closed unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your sister works through the list with the platforms directly, using the account emails and the legacy-contact arrangements you recorded. The vault accelerates the finding and knowing-what-to-ask-for steps, not the platforms’ identity verification.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are often split across the country — one sibling here, others in Melbourne or Sydney or overseas — which makes the practical hand-off of a parent’s digital life harder than it would be if everyone lived twenty minutes away. By the time the Melbourne sibling flies over, the phone has already locked itself permanently and the local sibling is exhausted. A vault that the interstate sibling can open from her own kitchen, with a clear inventory and the recovery contacts already named, removes one of the most painful logistical knots Perth carers describe.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Perth can register a first digital legacy module on behalf of an aging 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 photos themselves.