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

You’re raising kids in Perth with your partner, and between the two of you there are probably fifteen years of family photos on phones, an iCloud or Google account holding the overflow, a hard drive in a drawer with the early baby videos, and a couple of social accounts where most of the milestone posts live. If your phone went into the river tomorrow and nobody knew the PIN, most of that would be gone — not because it isn’t backed up, but because nobody could prove to Apple or Google that they were entitled to recover it. The plan is to leave your partner a clear map of where the family memories actually live and what should happen to each part of them.

The problem

Digital legacy is the asset class Australian families lose most often, and it’s the one estate planning hasn’t caught up with. ASIC MoneySmart’s guidance on wills covers bank accounts, super, and property — but the photos of your kids’ first steps aren’t in the will, and even if they were, a will doesn’t unlock a phone or persuade a cloud provider to release an account.

The pattern is consistent. A parent dies or is incapacitated. The phone is locked. The cloud account is tied to an email address the family can technically access but can’t recover from, because two-factor authentication points to the locked device. Apple, Google, and Meta all require identity documents and, often, a court order. Months pass. By the time the family gets through the process, the device has wiped itself or the storage tier has lapsed. A decade of family history is gone — not stolen, just inaccessible.

Your partner doesn’t need your PIN or your iCloud password. They need to know what exists, where it lives, who you’ve named as a recovery contact with each provider, and what you actually want done with each archive.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where it can be found, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (for individuals and families) records, per digital archive: the platform or device, the account identifier (the email address or handle, not the password), the recovery contact you’ve already set up with that provider, the rough scope of what’s stored there, and your intended fate for it — archive to family, delete, or publish.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your device PINs, not your cloud passwords, and not your recovery codes. That boundary is deliberate. The 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 obligations. The Privacy Act 1988 governs how the vault handles your personal information and the personal information of the recipient you name.

How it works

  1. You add each digital archive to your vault — phone (model and rough location of backups), iCloud or Google account email, social accounts, external drives, the platform-side recovery contact you’ve configured (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact).
  2. For each archive you record your intended fate: archive to the kids, hand to your partner, delete, or publish.
  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. 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.
  5. Your partner uses the inventory to approach each provider directly via the recovery contact pathway you’ve already set up. The vault accelerates the finding step; the providers run their own recovery process.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are geographically isolated from most Australian probate and digital-recovery support, and a three-hour time difference from the eastern states means callbacks to provider support lines often roll into the next business day. Families here also tend to hold more of their archive on physical media — external drives, old laptops in the garage — because home internet rollouts were patchier through the 2010s. That makes the inventory step matter more, not less: knowing that the 2014–2018 photos are on a specific drive in a specific drawer is the difference between recovering them and losing them when the household is dismantled.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Perth 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 PINs, not your cloud passwords, and not the archives themselves.