Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Adult Children: An Adelaide Parent’s Plan for Photos, Journals, and the Work of a Lifetime

You’re on your own in Adelaide — single, divorced, or widowed — and your adult children live their own lives now, maybe in Melbourne or back here near you. On your phone are twenty years of photos of them growing up. In a Dropbox folder somewhere is the novel you’ve been writing since 2014. There’s a Facebook account, an Instagram, a Google Drive full of scans of your parents’ old letters. If something happened tomorrow, your kids would not know any of the passwords, and Apple and Google would ask them for identity documents and court orders they don’t have.

The problem

When an Australian parent dies or loses capacity, the family’s first scramble is rarely the will. It’s the phone. The phone holds the photos, the messages, the two-factor codes for everything else — and the PIN is unknown. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance walks families through wills and powers of attorney, but a will doesn’t tell your children which cloud account holds the photos from your fortieth, or whether the manuscript on your laptop is the latest draft.

Cloud providers have their own deceased-user processes, and they’re slow, document-heavy, and not always successful. Adult children in this position routinely lose access to a parent’s entire photo library because the recovery contact was never set, the trusted-contact feature was never enabled, and the family had no inventory of where things lived in the first place. The memories aren’t gone — they’re locked behind authentication their children can’t pass.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register for your digital life. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per item or account: what it is (photo library, manuscript folder, social account, voice-note archive), where it lives (which device, which cloud service, which external drive in the spare room), whether you’ve nominated a platform-side recovery contact, and what you want done with it — archived to your children, deleted, published, or handed to a specific person. The vault does NOT hold your passwords, your Apple ID, your Google recovery codes, or any credential. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your device PINs, not your cloud passwords, not your recovery codes.

The boundary matters: Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register, which is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting. The personal information you record — about yourself and about the children you’ve named — is held under Australian Privacy Principles obligations described by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

How it works

  1. You add each digital asset to your vault — the photo library on your iPhone, the Google Drive with the scanned family letters, the half-finished manuscript on your MacBook, the Facebook and Instagram accounts.
  2. For each item you record where it lives, whether a platform recovery contact is set (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook memorialisation contact), and what you want done with it.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipient for the digital legacy module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see only the digital legacy module — not your other modules unless you’ve released those too.
  5. Your children use the inventory to approach each platform through its normal deceased-user or legacy process. The vault accelerates the finding and prioritising, not the platform’s verification.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide skews older than the national average and has a high share of solo householders — divorced, widowed, or never-partnered adults whose adult children often live interstate. That geography changes what a digital legacy looks like in practice: your children may not be in the house to find the laptop, won’t recognise which external drive is the family photo archive versus the work backup, and will be doing the platform-recovery paperwork from Melbourne or Sydney over patchy phone calls with you already gone. A written inventory — what exists, where, and what you want done with it — turns a months-long recovery process into a weekend of orderly admin.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Adelaide can register their first digital legacy module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your device PINs, not your cloud passwords, and not your recovery codes.