Running the Death & The Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG) at the OpenID Foundation has had me thinking about a specific failure mode: what happens if I lose all my devices at once? The Valencia floods, Central European flooding across Austria, Poland, and beyond, and wildfires in Greece have made it clear: this isn't a theoretical risk.
I'm an identity nerd. I've maintained a "break glass kit" for years securely stored where my wife and I can both access it. This is Schrödinger’s Break Glass Kit, it exists in a quantum state between perfectly engineered and catastrophically broken. I won't know until I open it.
Starting from a freshly imaged Mac — no phone, no watch, no Yubikeys, no other devices — I will walk you through my personal break glass plan in practice. The questions I'm trying to answer:
• Can I successfully recover target systems?
• Are there circular dependencies?
• Are the break glass instructions executable by others if I am incapacitated?
I'll cover the full arc from obtaining the physical assets, how I prioritized what to restore and when, and what I changed after going through the exercise. I'll close with practical guidance so you can build - and test - your own kit.
