What happens to your home server if you are not around? A free keep-or-shut-down planner
If you run a NAS, Home Assistant, a photo server or a password vault for your household, your partner will not know which box is safe to switch off and which one quietly holds the family together. Tick what you run. You get a printable one-page plan with a safe default for each service: keep it running, export first, or ask the helper before touching it. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Tick the services above and press "Make my plan".
How the defaults were chosen
The default for each service follows one rule: the more of the household's daily life depends on it, the more a hurried shutdown costs. Systems that hold logins, hold the only copy of something, or keep the house running are marked keep running or export first. Entertainment is safe to turn off. These are sensible starting points from experience of how home systems fail, not vendor guarantees, so adjust them to your house.
Do this before you rely on it
- Test one real restore of your backups; a plan that was never restored is a hope. The guide What your family needs to take over your tech explains what the big vendors do and do not hand over.
- Print the free start-here sheet to go with this plan, and find your gaps with the handover gap checker.
- The Handover Binder ($9) adds an access map, account and renewal registers, and dated steps for recovery codes and exports from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Bitwarden, Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud and Synology.
This is a planning aid, not legal or financial advice and not a will.