How can I save my passwords securely?

We’re hearing this question from our customers. How can I keep track of all my passwords? Domain name server, email account, FTP, WordPress admin login, Gmail account, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – passwords everywhere. With password standards becoming more strict, they’re harder to remember. With all the required password changes, it’s easier than ever to lose them. Everybody wants to know – how can I save my passwords securely?

Mac OS has Keychain,  a built-in utility capable of saving your website passwords, credit card info, your Mac’s login credentials, and other passwords. In order to view your passwords in Keychain, there’s one drawback – you have to know your Mac’s admin password. We’ve run into serious issues with clients who don’t know it or have any record of it, and they’re unable to install or upgrade anything on their machine. It’s possible to reset the admin password on the Mac, but the process is inevitably protracted and traumatic. If you remember nothing else, remember your machine’s admin password. Write it down. Put it in a file, or in a safe… but you MUST retain this.

Windows has a number of password storage app utilities. There’s a useful article in PCWorld online about the multiple choices available for password storage and recall on Windows.

Losing passwords or having them stolen or hacked is extremely inconvenient. Just finding login information or recovering a hacked account can burn up hours… and, if you do recovery on a website or other account your webmaster needs access to, you can bring work to a halt – until he gets the chance to add himself as an admin or user on these accounts.

There may be cases where these utilities don’t track a particular password.

Put them in a password-protected file or archive.

Mac:

There’s a couple of ways to password-protect your data on the Mac, one for an individual file and the other for an entire folder.

First one is –

Put all the passwords in one document, and make it a password-protected pdf file.

1. Open the document
2. Select File/Print (or hit command-p)



3, In the lower left of the print dialog, select PDF/Save as PDF



1. Select “Security Options” in the next dialog

 

1. Apply a password to the document



1. Save it, check it, then delete the original.

Since you won’t be able to edit the converted file, I’d suggest keeping the original in a password-protected archive so you can edit it, add passwords, update it, etc.

The second method shows how to convert a Folder into an archive with a password

There’s a helpful MacWorld article on the subject here

On Windows PC

Save your password list document as a pdf

Make a pdf using the free Cute Pdf utility then change the permissions for the file. There’s a complete article on the subject on the Digital Trends website.

To create a password-protected archive on the PC

Use the free utility 7-Zip for PC.

If you lose your vital passwords and need help in recovery, we can help you out.
The bad news is we charge $1.25 a minute for the work. Call Apple or Microsoft first!