>There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share.
This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."
> More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away
I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll you'll find that few children care about their parent's "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents who found that they didn't have any interest in going through their parents stuff and then from that realized their children would be the same to them.
Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures that are relevant to them are those with people they know. The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are searching for financial documents so they can finish up their parent's financial affairs.
> discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share
I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.
Nobody in my family was waiting for one of my parents to die and it actually happened rather suddenly although he was retirement age. There was a very rapid effort to ensure we discovered as many passwords as possible, bought a family NAS, and backed up his entire computer starting with the Lightroom video and pictures. We later went through all of the family photos and folders he hadn't put in there.
To this day it's constantly running with an off site back up to my NAS. There are some photos of cousins we didn't really know, but he owned the best digital cameras of every era since their invention so it's a huge documentation of life. It would have been a family tragedy to lose that.
That’s family records. People care about that. I will hazard you probably didn’t peruse their whole collection of books and magasines however and I think it’s normal.
People care about the things which remind them of their loved ones: prized possessions, objects with strong memory attached too or things they used to love as kids, this kind of things.
>There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share.
This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."