I have had more people than you might think come to me looking for help with forgotten passwords. Most of the time there is little  I can do to recover your password. There is, however, something users can do to make sure they don’t forget their passwords. Use a password manager program. I use a program called Keepass. It’s available for both Windows and Mac users and combined with your dropbox account you will never, NEVER, be without your password.

 

First let’s download Keepass. For you Windows users out there head over to the following link…

http://keepass.info/

Once you have download the app, go ahead and create a new password database. You can do this by clicking the first icon on the toolbar in the Keepass window (See the orange arrow in the Window dialog image below). Choose a password you will remember!!! When we are done with this process you will only need to remember this one password. For extra security you can create a key file that you can store on a USB drive. This will prevent access to your new password database unless the user has the master password and the key file. I’ll let you decide if you think you need this.

After you have chosen your master password create an entry in the database by clicking the “New Entry” icon on the toolbar (See the red arrow in the Window dialog image above). Here’s where Dropbox comes into play. Select -> File -> Save As… from the file menu and then give your database a name. I suggest something inconspicuous like RefData.kdb or Clients.kdb anything but “passwords.kdb”. Browse to your Dropbox folder and save it to a folder there. This will sync it across all your computers with Dropbox installed as well as give you access to the file from any where as long as you have access to the internet and a web browser. Any changes to the database, ie. add/change/delete a password, are automatically synced across all your desktops. This means you only have to worry about this one file and it updates pretty much instantly across all your desktops.

 

For you Mac users the process is pretty much the same. You download a program called KeepassX which is virtually identical in every way.

 

 

 

 

You can download the application from the following URL…

http://www.keepassx.org/

Once downloaded follow the steps outlined above for Windows users. Remember to save your newly created password database to your Dropbox folder so you will have one database that you can access from all of your computers. That’s it. One password to remember. One database that syncs across all your desktops. Doesn’t get much easier than that.