Back in the day I used to use a little index book for passwords, temporary email addresses, and all that security stuff.
A while back I started using a password manager because it's the 21st century and you can't always carry an index book around.
A couple of weeks back I added a plug-in to my otherwise very reliable password manager. Bad move. Something went wrong.
The end of the story is that after many hours of fault finding and an eventual registry edit I finally got my passwords back.
Well, that was extremely close.
I dunno what the answer is really. The password manager solution seems to offer great security with the ability to create and remember unique passwords for every login, but god you're stuffed if the thing stops working.
Hey ho, 21st C problems. Anyone else solved them?
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I use Lastpass, it's an absolute gem and the only phone app I pay for because it's cheap and amazing.
Do you want a referral code?
People tend not to break into your house to steal your passwords.
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So lets say you want to generate a password from thefretboard.co.uk.
In a simple alg the t gets inverted from it's position in the alphabet ..... instead of being 7 from the end you put in 7 from the start so now becomes g ..... h becomes s etc .... for a number square the amount of characters in the url .... first vowel gets a capital letter. So it's like a much simpler enigma code
Course i means if anyone cracks your alg then they have every password to every site but there's always a risk to anything.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
I think @octatonic ‘s approach is pragmatic and sounds like a reasonable assessment of risk. It’s basically a variation on the index book. @roundthebend — I really thought about using Lastpass as I’ve heard nothing but good about it, however I can’t shake off my old skool feeling that I want to be in control of my own file. And @thecolourbox describes pretty much what I did prior to using a secure database file and it works nice and simple but I no longer feel is secure enough.
For what it’s worth I was using KeePass without problem till I tried to get it to sync across devices to Google Drive via a plug in. Google drive allows multiple copies of a file with the same file name — it does not overwrite earlier copies. I think that corrupted the database. But worse, it glitched the save function of KeePass — so I was unable to save any new data.
I think for the time being I’ll continue to use KeePass but keep it totally vanilla from now on. It means you have to sync manually but that’s not the end of the world. Whereas losing all your passwords kinda is. Definitely going to make a hard copy backup though.
I always think of this when I think about passwords:
https://www.xkcd.com/936/
Or, if the tinfoil hat fits, we've trained people to use passwords which are easy for government agencies with access to powerful computers to crack...
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