I heard a number of stories of people passing away, and their loved ones have to figure out how to navigate their digital “estate”. Things like email credentials, bank accounts, crypto wallets, logins for personal devices, etc. For example, I have a good friend whose husband passed away unexpectedly, and she couldn’t get Apple to unlock his laptop for months, until she provided a death certificate and jumped through additional hoops.
I fell down a rabbit hole of checklists, methods, and technology, and was curious what other people were doing to leave digital assets behind. I’m looking for something that will be privacy-oriented, but still provide access to people who may not be very tech-savvy.
What do other people do? Especially from a technology perspective?
In case you hadn’t seen the news.
I’ve been a paying customer and advocate of 1Password for over a decade but I’ve made the switch to something else.
What is the something else? As far as I can tell, all the password managers suck. Just seemed to me that 1Password sucked less.
For me, I narrowed it down to Bitwarden and Proton Pass.
I found it very hard to test both in parallel so I ended up just kind of making a feel-based call. I think either would have been fine, but I don’t think either is as nice as 1Password.
Bitwarden supports transferring passkeys from other password managers (on iOS anyway) but Proton Pass doesn’t. That was going to be the deciding factor for me, but the transfer failed (I believe this was a failure at the OS level; not Bitwarden’s fault) so I ultimately went with Proton Pass because I felt the interface was a little cleaner.
Vaultwarden if you can manage a selfhosted option. It allows you to set a specified account to be able to take yours over after a delay (in case you die)
I started using Bitwarden only a few months before Proton pass came out. I want to switch, but I’m so lazy. Having the email alias feature built into the password manager would make my life so much easier.