Lots of other people have mentioned very good practical reasons (and you can read the linked post for others, like people being unsure of what the password to t

Lots of other people have mentioned very good practical reasons (and you can read the linked post for others, like people being unsure of what the password to the Vim FTP is), but there are lots of good sentimental ones as well. When something like this happens, you lose your mind slightly, and you become obsessed with preserving whatever is possible to preserve of the person. I went so far as to record his voice-mail message, just because I felt i needed to. Of all the internet stuff, the thing that was most important to us was photos: he was a photographer, and he used a photo-uploading service (I think it was Google Photos, but I'm unsure, it's been a couple of years) and I was able to get an archive with all his thousands of photographs. Eventually, I put everything I could possibly find (computers, internet services, whatever) into one big zip file, and put it on my local NAS (which is backed up to the cloud). I don't think I'll ever have the heart to go through it again, but my brother had young kids who never really got to know their dad. I figure one day they might want to look at it (even if it's 30 years from now) so it makes me feel good to know that it's been preserved.