Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Partner: A Brisbane Parent’s Plan for the Family Photos, Videos, and Voice Notes

You’re a parent in Brisbane. The first eight years of your kids’ lives live on a phone, in a cloud account, and scattered across two laptops — birthday videos, school concerts, the voice note your mum left before she got sick, the playlist your partner made when you brought the baby home. If your phone falls in the river at Wivenhoe tomorrow and your partner doesn’t know which cloud account holds what, or who the recovery contact is, your family loses the only copy of half a decade.

The problem

Australian families regularly lose a lifetime of photos because the device PIN was never shared and cloud-account recovery requires identity documents the family doesn’t have. The big platforms (Apple, Google, Meta) all have legacy-contact or memorialisation flows, but each one requires you to have nominated a contact in advance — and most parents haven’t, because the prompts are buried in account settings nobody reads.

Your partner doesn’t need your iCloud password. They need to know: which accounts hold which memories (the Google Photos library versus the iCloud roll versus the external hard drive in the office cupboard), whether you’ve set a legacy contact on each platform and who it is, where the kids’ baby videos actually live, and what you want done with the material — archived for the children, handed to your sister, deleted, or published. Without that list, your partner is locked out of the very files they need most while juggling small children and a funeral.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where it lives, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per digital-legacy item: the platform or device, the account identifier (email address or username — not the password), whether a platform legacy contact has been set and who it is, the physical location of any backup drives, and your intended fate for the material (archive to the children, hand to a named family member, delete, publish). It does NOT hold your passwords, your device PIN, your iCloud recovery key, or any credential. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your logins. Your partner sees only the inventory you’ve prepared for them, and only when you’ve authorised release.

The boundary matters: the 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 obligations, and it’s why the contents of the vault are governed by ordinary Australian Privacy Principles (under the Privacy Act 1988) rather than by financial-services law.

How it works

  1. You add each digital-legacy location to your vault — the iCloud account email, the Google account email, the external drive in the second drawer, the USB stick in the safe.
  2. For each one, you record whether a platform legacy contact has been set (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook memorialisation contact) and who that person is.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the digital-legacy module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act).
  4. You record your intended fate for each item: keep for the kids when they turn eighteen, hand to your sibling, archive and delete, publish a selection.
  5. 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. They then contact each platform through its own legacy process with the account identifier you provided.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane households skew younger than the national average and hold more of their family record on phones rather than in printed albums. Queensland’s State Library has run multiple public-information campaigns on personal digital preservation precisely because so much family history now exists only on devices with passcodes the next generation can’t bypass. A clear instruction set — what exists, where, who the recovery contact is, what should happen to it — is the difference between your children growing up with their first eight years on video and your children growing up with a locked phone in a drawer.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Brisbane 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 device PIN, not your iCloud password, and not the photos themselves.