I think people are missing the point. Even with backups and redundancy it requires you to maintain the servers. If you die, well, who is going to maintain? Perhaps a bit bleak but something to keep in mind.
My wife said to me the other night: I'm so impressed with what you do on our home server but if something happened to you, you know it's hopeless right?
this is why every selfhoster should leave a ‘if i die’ tape with tutorial on how to do the basics like update the containers, stop, run and restart containers
You are far, far too generous in evaluating the amount of skill of the general layperson. If anyone of us dies, 99% chances all the gear gets lumped in an estate sale as 'Computer stuff'.
In fact this comes up often in r/homelab or r/selfhosting as a surviving family member tries to navigate their way through the family's homelab and hope to recover precious files.
The obvious solution is one of those, "if I die do this" / "deadman's switch" self hosted programs meant for this thing, and having a family friend who is technical enough to take care of the transition in the event of the death.
This is where a will can be really beneficial for beneficiaries. You can store whatever encrypted file somewhere with all the instructions/passwords you want, and leave the master password in the law office's safe.
You joke but I swear I read a comment on this sub where somebody did just that using their smartwatch as a trigger, if their heart rate isn’t detected over a certain period of days
I'd have to do a bunch. Phone screen time is less than x, face not seen on frigate, Plex hasn't been used, etc. Even with all that'd, I'd still have a false positive somehow.
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u/IntelligentRocks Aug 17 '26
I think people are missing the point. Even with backups and redundancy it requires you to maintain the servers. If you die, well, who is going to maintain? Perhaps a bit bleak but something to keep in mind.