HOW TO CREATE A DIGITAL WlLL

There’s nothing like a pandemic to make us confront our mortality. Most of us of a certain age will likely have documented what we’d like to happen to our house, savings and other tangible assets when we expire, but far fewer have given any serious thought to what happens to their digital estate.

Your next of kin might inherit the laptop left on your desk, but would they be able to get any further than the login screen? What happens to the decades of family photos and videos you’ve got stored on that computer and online services? What about your digital music collection, the money in your PayPal account, the shares you bought, the £400 in your online gambling account? Does anyone but you know how to access this stuff? Does anyone know it even exists?

Fail to create a digital will and there’s a good chance all of this stuff will disappear, robbing your family of precious memories and potentially precious assets. At the very least, they face a tortuous process involving court orders to try and retrieve them, with no guarantee of success.

There’s the flip side to consider too. What if you don’t want your family to have access to your emails, photos and other digital files? Terry Pratchett famously requested that the hard disks containing his unfinished novels