Ensuring Access to Family or Professional data in the Event of your Death

As I age (40-something) I begin to consider the difficulties my own family would have in the even of my death. Ours is a typical household in that all Mumma and the kids want to do is happily compute and not bother with the details. Sure, it kills me a little but I accept it and we're all better for it ;) However, In our case we have maybe 15 years of data stored and sometimes it's encrypted. At the very least some data is archived and password protected, even on the cds I burned it to. Speaking of cds, would your family know that the expected life of a cdrom is ~ 10 years? Would your wife, husband, or child simply toss a cdrom into the trash that appeared to be non-working instead of knowing which utility to try to recover data or even that mounting a cdrom can be trivially simple even if your fancy GNU/Linux system doesn't do it automagically?

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