Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Partner: An Adelaide Parent’s Plan for the Photos, Videos and Memories

You’re raising kids in Adelaide. The last decade of family life — the first steps, the school concerts, the road trip to the Flinders, the voice notes from the grandparents — lives on your phone, in one cloud account, and across a couple of social profiles. If your phone fell in the Torrens tomorrow and your partner had to recover it, they’d hit a PIN they don’t know and a recovery process that asks for identity documents you never set up. The plan is to leave your partner a clear map of what exists, where it lives, and what you’d want done with it.

The problem

Australian families regularly lose a lifetime of photos because the device PIN was never shared and cloud-account recovery requires identity verification the family can’t produce. Phones are biometric-locked. Cloud providers won’t release an account without specific documents. Social platforms have memorialisation processes that vary by service and require proof of relationship. None of this is covered by a will — and the ASIC MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning is clear that wills deal with the legal estate, not the practical mechanics of finding and recovering digital files.

Your partner doesn’t need your phone PIN or your cloud password. They need to know: which devices hold the originals, which cloud account is the master backup, whether you’ve nominated a recovery contact on your Apple or Google account, which social profiles exist, and what you’d like to happen to each — archived for the kids, memorialised, or deleted.

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, the account identifier (email address, handle), the recovery contact you’ve nominated with the provider, the location of any printed recovery codes, and your intended fate for the content (archive to family, memorialise, delete, publish). The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your PINs, passwords, or recovery codes themselves.

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 keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations. It also means the personal information in the vault — yours, your partner’s, and the recovery contacts you’ve named — is handled under the Australian Privacy Principles, as set out by the OAIC.

How it works

  1. You add each digital asset to your vault — the iPhone in the kitchen drawer, the iCloud account holding the photo library, the Google account with the Drive backups, the Facebook and Instagram profiles, the external hard drive in the study.
  2. For each, you record the account identifier, the nominated recovery contact (the person you’ve already set on the provider’s side, if any), and your intended fate for the content.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the digital legacy module and they accept. The vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles.
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the digital legacy instructions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner contacts each provider directly using the documented recovery process. The vault accelerates the finding and prioritising steps — what matters most, where it lives, what you wanted done — not the provider’s identity-verification process.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families tend to span generations in one city — grandparents in the northern suburbs, cousins in the hills, the family home held for decades. The photo and video record of that family life is concentrated in a handful of devices and cloud accounts, and the loss is total when recovery fails. A clear instruction set — which device holds the originals, which cloud account is the master, who the nominated recovery contact is — turns a six-month identity-verification ordeal into a series of phone calls your partner can actually make in the weeks after a death.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Adelaide can register their first digital legacy module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your phone PIN, not your iCloud password, and not the recovery codes themselves.