Access
Whether anyone can open the account at all. This is what platform tools such as legacy contacts and inactive-account settings are designed to handle.
A Definition Worth Being Precise About
A digital legacy is the whole of your digital life plus the instructions that govern it. The data on its own is not a legacy — an unlabelled hard drive nobody can open is simply lost property. What turns it into a legacy is that someone knows it exists, is allowed to reach it, and understands what they are looking at.
Why It Matters Now
Almost everything a family used to inherit as objects now exists only as files. Photographs live in a cloud account rather than a shoebox; a grandmother's voice is a voice note rather than a letter. Those things are more fragile, not less.
- Most accounts become inaccessible when nobody has been named
- Photographs are usually the first thing a family tries — and fails — to recover
- Files survive far longer than the explanation of what they show
- The people who could identify a photograph are often the ones who died with it
- Platforms change their policies more often than families revisit their plans
- Half an afternoon of instructions prevents years of guesswork
What Happens To Photographs, Stories And Accounts
It helps to separate two very different problems, because most people only ever solve the first.
Meaning
Whether anyone can understand what they have opened. Inherited archives usually arrive as thousands of unnamed, undated files with no story attached.
Continuity
Whether the archive keeps being cared for. A legacy with no named custodian tends to sit untouched until a device fails.
Permission
Whether your family knows what you would have wanted shared, kept private, or quietly deleted. Left unsaid, this becomes their burden.
How To Plan Yours
Planning a digital legacy is mostly a sequence of small, ordinary decisions. Our step-by-step guide walks through the settings; here is the shape of the work.
I
Find where your life is stored
List the accounts, phones and drives that actually hold photographs, films, recordings and documents.
II
Name the people
Decide who should be able to reach what, and record it somewhere your family will find — alongside your will, not inside an email draft.
III
Preserve the meaning
Label the photographs that matter, record the stories behind them, and keep the explanation next to the file rather than in your head.
IV
Review it
Revisit the plan once a year and after major device or account changes, and add whatever has since become important.
Guides In This Series
Each of these goes considerably deeper than this page can.
Setting up your digital legacy, step by step
The practical how-to: nominating legacy contacts, choosing what each person receives, and fixing the settings that quietly fail.
Apple's Legacy Contact, explained
What Apple's Legacy Contact does and does not do, and where account access ends and memory preservation begins.
Writing an ethical will
How to hand on values, apologies, gratitude and advice — the part of a life that a legal will has no room for.
Preserving family history
Photographs, recorded voices and the context around them, gathered while the people who can explain them are still here.
How Memorivos Approaches It
Memorivos is not a replacement for the legacy controls your accounts already offer, and it does not manage anyone's accounts. It exists for the second problem — the meaning.
A memory becomes an exhibit: the photograph, the year, the names, the place, and the story told in the voice of whoever remembers it. Rooms group those exhibits so a visitor can walk through a life rather than scroll a folder. Legacy Mode decides who inherits the museum and when, and the Legacy Vault holds the guardians, permissions and instructions behind it. Nothing is released unless you have said so.