Password manager

It’s not a problem when you need to remember a couple of passwords, but it’s a pain to manage a lot of passwords, and remember them all. In my case, as a webdeveloper, I have a long list of sites, emails, ftp servers, mysql servers, and all kind of other things which come with users and passwords. It’s damn hard to remember them all.

My previous solution was to store them in my email, and tag them as “password”, but that’s hard to manage, because I almost never delete an email, so those tagged emails got lost and forgotten (even though they were still there)…and it took me at least 5 minutes every time I wanted to retrieve a password.

The other place where I have a lot of stored passwords is Filezilla (I use a bunch of ftp servers). It automatically saves the passwords of all ftp sites I use. Then, if I want to retrieve a password, I know there’s an xml file somewhere I can open and look at the full list of sites, users, and passwords (that’s not too secure, is it?). But again, it took me 5 minutes to find a password I needed.

I’ve been using something different lately. I admit I’m still very disorganized and don’t use it as much as I’d like, but the truth is that the more I use it, the more I like it. As that sounds a bit weird (if you’re a pervert), let me tell you what I'm talking about: KeePass. What is it? They say:

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish)

It’s a small app, but it has all the features I need. I mostly need a way to store users and passwords, and this app does that very well, of course. One of the things I like the most is that there’s a portable version as well, which means you don’t have to install it, as you can run it directly from a thumbdrive.

By the way, I just notice there are several versions of Keepass for pocketPc, java enabled phones, iphone, blackberry, palmOS and android. That’s sweet, isn’t it?