“Until recently, when a family member died you would look through their filing cabinet to find details of their accounts, browse their address book to find their contacts and inherit their physical photo albums. But my accounts for banks and utilities are online. My contacts are in Google and Outlook and my photos in several places, to keep them safe. Then there are my email accounts and accounts for all the social media, shopping, travel sites I use … the list seems endless. I must get organised so I don’t leave my children a digital nightmare.”

That’s from my 2018 TechTips Your digital legacy and I’ve been working on this ever since. Not because I’m disorganised or it’s too complicated but because, as I wrote back then, “As this is sensitive data, I need to be careful where it’s saved.” Over the years, I’ve tried various encrypted note-taking apps. But they were too expensive. Or lost my data. Or were difficult to share. But now I have a solution.

Based in Switzerland, which has some of the world’s strongest privacy laws, Proton is a company that puts security at the heart of everything it does; its encrypted email has been praised for years. In 2024, they released Proton Docs and gave me the answer to my problem. Proton Docs are secure, web-based documents created and edited within Proton Drive, with end-to-end encryption that protects everything inside. Even Proton can’t read them.

Proton’s free plan gives 5GB of storage – plenty for this project. In my Drive, I have a Digital Asset List folder with subfolders like Finance, Admin, Family, Work. In these, I have one Proton Doc per organisation containing all the relevant account and access information, except the passwords. Those are safely stored, with an appropriate cross-reference, in Bitwarden, my free, fully encrypted password manager. That may seem over the top but, even with Proton’s encryption, keeping passwords separately in Bitwarden adds an extra layer of protection.

The next step is making the information available to my family. Happily, Proton makes this simple and secure using its “Share” capability. This gives a secure link they can just save until they need it.

There’s one final step. The Digital Asset List tells my family how to access my accounts, but it doesn’t give them the legal rights to the contents. That comes from updating my will. Once that’s done, I’ll finally have peace of mind knowing my digital life won’t become my family’s digital headache and that those precious family photos won’t be forever locked away in my accounts.