What is the proper way to go through someone's digital stuff when they die?

very carefully

I was going to type that, as it is my classic reply. Then I remembered the tyime I was working at a print shop and had to scan photos of a kid who'd been shot for a Power Point to show at the funeral, pain in the ass last-minute job. THEN I saw the photos, which were of my good friend Cameron who'd been sent off to one of those teen discipline death camps. So death is not funny and this question is sad.

No offense to anyone. :{

"Digital Stuff" = computer files or computer accounts? or both?

Either way, I'm not quite sure. I can understand why someone would want to keep accounts running, but occasionally, I'll come across an old comment from my deceased friend and then feel nauseous.

It's an interesting question. When my grandparents died there were mountains of paperwork to go through; financial records, old photos, scrapbooks, letters. Some you have to look at some you don't. So much more of that is digital nowadays.

Practically I don't know how one goes about it. As executor you can probably get access to online banking, but how do you go about getting into encrypted files or accounts on a home PC? And what about personal email, do hotmail, gmail etc. have a policy on giving out account details to executors?

I seem to remember something on lifehacker about this.

with your pants on

According to my Google sources, in their case, if you contact their legal department and can prove that you are the executor of the will, they will give you the contents of their email account on a CD. My google source does not know if they will then shut down the account for you.

The contents of the deceased person's email account, I mean.

My uncle died recently and our main problem with this wasn't sensitive banking data or anything, it was just the fact that formatting the drive and re-using it seemed equivalent to clearing out someone's house and throwing away all their most sentimental nick-nacks and tresured photos etc without second thought. We didn't want to poke around the drive and go through all his personal stuff for obvious reasons, so we just kept the drive and stuck it amongst all our destroyed drives which we've not thrown out because it's easier to keep a busted drive in a shoebox in the loft than throw it out and worry about folks recovering data and whatnot.

The worst thing is mobile phones though - what do you do? My mum (his sister) still hangs onto it because, again, it seems sort of coldhearted to wipe everything on there and chuck it out. He also still gets the odd message every now and then. Is it right to read them, or what? She still keeps it charged, but doesn't use it - where I'd probably let it run down and keep it in the shoebox with his hard drive.

Sorry about the garbled, hazy reply. I get a headache thinking about this sort of thing. I haven't had to deal with this with a close friend or family member who's died - I've only helped my mum out as she wouldn't have a clue where to start with a computer that isn't her own. No doubt when my dad, whose main pastime and job for the last 30 years or so has been based around computers, dies I'll be an expert on this subject.