What is a digital legacy?
A digital legacy is the sum of everything someone leaves behind in digital form after they die. Photos on their phone. Emails they wrote. Social media profiles. Videos. Voice messages. A blog they kept for ten years. A playlist they curated over a lifetime. Comments they left on other people's posts.
None of this is trivial. For most people alive today, their digital footprint is the most comprehensive record of their life that has ever existed — more detailed than any diary, more complete than any photo album, more honest than most published accounts. The way someone texted their daughter at midnight. The photos they saved but never shared. The things they searched for when they thought no one was watching.
A digital legacy is also, by default, fragile. Companies shut down. Subscriptions expire. Platforms change their policies. Passwords get lost. Without intentional planning, most of it disappears — quietly, without ceremony, often within months of death.
of grieving families report difficulty accessing a loved one's digital accounts after death — most commonly because of a locked phone with no shared passcode, according to a 2024 Caring.com survey.
What happens to online accounts after death
Every major platform handles death differently, and most people have no idea what their own platforms will do. Here's the short version:
| Platform | What happens by default | What you can set up in advance |
|---|---|---|
| Account stays up but becomes inactive. May be reported and memorialized. | Designate a legacy contact who can manage the memorialized profile. Or choose to delete the account after death. | |
| Can be memorialized on request. No new content can be added. | No advance designation currently. Family must submit a request after death. | |
| Google / Gmail | Account may be deleted after extended inactivity. | Set up Inactive Account Manager to designate a trusted person to receive data or delete the account. |
| Apple / iCloud | Account and data are inaccessible without credentials. | Designate a Legacy Contact in iPhone settings. They receive an access key after death. |
| X / Twitter | Account stays up indefinitely. No memorialization option. | No advance designation. Family can request deactivation with a death certificate. |
| Email generally | Usually inaccessible without the password. May be deleted by provider. | Share login credentials with a trusted person in a secure document or password manager. |
The pattern is consistent: platforms that offer advance planning tools are underused to a striking degree. Fewer than 3% of users have activated legacy contact features on platforms that offer them, despite most major platforms now having these options available. The gap between the tools that exist and the number of people who use them is enormous.
What usually gets lost — and why
The losses tend to happen in one of a few ways.
The locked phone. A smartphone with no shared passcode is a vault. Thousands of photos, years of messages, and memories that exist nowhere else can sit permanently inaccessible behind a six-digit code nobody knows. Families report spending months navigating legal processes and technical workarounds to recover data — all while grieving.
The expired subscription. Cloud storage services, photo apps, email providers — many of these delete data after a period of inactivity or when a subscription lapses. If nobody knows an account exists, nobody renews it. The data disappears without notice.
The platform shutdown. Services that seemed permanent close all the time. Memorial websites started by well-meaning companies have disappeared, taking with them everything families uploaded. Reputable permanent memorial platforms have succession plans in place — either endowment funding to maintain servers indefinitely, or agreements with other services to adopt and continue hosting orphaned memorials. Most platforms don't.
The nobody-knew-it-existed problem. A blog someone kept privately for years. A photo archive on an obscure service. A journal app on a tablet nobody opened. If no one knows to look for it, it's effectively already gone.
How to preserve a digital legacy, step by step
Locate and inventory the digital accounts
Start by making a list of every digital presence the person had — social media, email addresses, photo storage, cloud services, streaming subscriptions, any website or blog they maintained. Ask family members to help. Check their phone's saved passwords, their email inbox for account confirmation emails, and their browser's saved logins if you have access. You can't preserve what you don't know exists.
Download and back up photos and videos first
Photos and videos are the most irreplaceable and most at risk. Prioritize them above everything else. Download from iCloud, Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram — anywhere they might be stored. Save multiple copies in multiple locations: an external hard drive, a cloud backup service, and a shared family folder. Don't rely on a single copy in a single place. Services fail. Drives die. Redundancy is the only protection that works.
Decide what to do with each account
For each account, you have three options: memorialize it, archive and close it, or leave it as-is. Facebook and Instagram can be memorialized — they become tribute spaces where friends can still post. Most other accounts are better archived and closed. Leaving accounts open indefinitely creates a strange digital presence: birthday reminders going out years later, accounts appearing in "people you may know" suggestions, or — in the worst cases — being targeted by hackers who know the account is unmonitored.
Gather the stories while you still can
The most valuable parts of a digital legacy aren't the accounts — they're the stories. And those live in the memories of the people who knew the person. Ask family members to write down or record one or two specific memories while they're fresh. Ask old friends. Ask former colleagues. These stories are the raw material for a life story page or memorial, and they're lost forever if nobody collects them while people still remember clearly.
Build a central, permanent home for everything
Social media profiles are not permanent homes. They're rented space on someone else's platform, subject to policy changes, account deletion, and company failure. A dedicated online memorial page gives the digital legacy a home that the family controls — with photos, the life story, a guest book, and a space people can return to. Think of it as the difference between a post on Facebook and a website you own. One is permanent. The other isn't.
Build a memorial page that lasts
Eternal Obituary gives your loved one a permanent online home — photos, life story, memory wall, and more. One-time payment, no subscriptions, no ads, no expiration date.
Create a memorial page →Building an online memorial that lasts
An online memorial is more than an obituary with a photo. Done well, it's a living record — a place where the full texture of someone's life is preserved in a way that death notices and funeral programs never could.
The difference between a memorial page that people return to for years and one that gets visited once comes down to depth and permanence. Depth means it contains real things: specific stories, photos from across a whole life, the person's own words when possible, memories contributed by the people who knew them. Permanence means it's hosted somewhere stable, with a business model that doesn't require the memorial to disappear when a subscription lapses or a company pivots.
When choosing where to build a memorial page, look for clear language about how long the page will stay online and whether you own the content. The technical details should fade into the background — you shouldn't need to understand privacy settings or web design to honor someone you love. A one-time payment model, rather than an ongoing subscription, aligns better with the idea of permanence. You pay once. The memorial stays forever.
What to include in a digital memorial
A well-built digital memorial does several things at once. It tells the story of the person's life, gives friends and family a place to share their own memories, and serves as a reference for practical information like service details and donation requests. Here's what to include:
Not just recent ones. Childhood photos, school years, early career, family milestones. The full arc of a life, not just the end of it.
A written account of who they were — their biography, the things they loved, the people they shaped. More personal than a newspaper obituary needs to be.
A place where anyone who knew them can leave a story, a memory, or a message. These contributions often become the most treasured part of the memorial.
Date, time, and location of any memorial service. RSVP functionality. Donation links. Everything guests need in one place.
Songs they loved, recordings of them speaking or laughing, video tributes from family. Media brings a memorial to life in a way words alone can't.
Quotes, letters, things they wrote, messages they sent. When you can include the person's own voice in the memorial, do. It's irreplaceable.
You don't need all of this at once. Most memorial pages are built incrementally — starting with the basics at the time of death, then enriched with photos, stories, and memories over the weeks and months that follow. The memorial page designs at Eternal Obituary are built to support exactly this kind of gradual building.
Planning your own digital legacy in advance
Most people don't think about their digital legacy until they're managing someone else's. But planning your own — even loosely — is one of the kindest things you can do for the people who'll be left to deal with it.
It doesn't require a lawyer or a formal document. A few practical steps cover most of it:
- Write down your accounts and passwords somewhere a trusted person can access. A password manager with a shared emergency access feature, or a sealed envelope in the same place as your will, both work. The format matters less than the fact that someone can find it.
- Set up legacy contacts on the platforms that offer them. Apple Legacy Contact (in iPhone Settings → your name → Legacy Contact), Google Inactive Account Manager, and Facebook Legacy Contact all take about five minutes to set up and save families months of frustration.
- Decide what you want done with your accounts. Do you want your Facebook profile memorialized or deleted? Do you want your photos shared with family or kept private? Write it down. Even informal notes are better than leaving these decisions entirely to others.
- Back up what matters. If there are photos or documents that exist only on one device or one platform, back them up now. Don't assume the cloud will always be there.
- Tell someone where to find everything. The best-prepared digital legacy plan is useless if nobody knows it exists.
People also ask
A digital legacy doesn't preserve itself. The photos, the messages, the accounts — they require someone to act, and usually soon. But the effort pays something real back: a record of a person that's fuller and more honest than anything we could have created for previous generations, kept somewhere people can actually find it and return to it.
If you're ready to build a permanent home for someone's memory — one that collects photos, stories, and tributes in one place — Eternal Obituary makes it simple. Browse memorial page designs here, or take a look at our guides on writing the obituary and publishing it online if you're starting from scratch.