Many people respond much like you do when first learning of 1Password. The reality is it actually does much more than Keychain. It requires more than a cursory glance to understand this. But, that’s a topic for another day.

Take care

Getting a password manager for Macs are awfully redundant as they already have one built in to it (Keychain). After taking a quick look on the site you posted just about everything it does is already baked in to OS X (auto form fill, previously mentioned Keychain, etc.).

The only reason why I’d use something like KeePassX is because I also use KeePass on my Windows boxes.

http://agilewebsolutions.com/

That is only for PC, correct? I don’t think you can run KeepassX as a portable…at least when I tried it, MacOS would not open it…

It would be great if this worked however, and on both Mac/PC…

You can carry around your encrypted Keepass database file on a thumb drive or put it on dropbox, but you still have to have a Keepass application on your computer hard drive in order to access it. This isn’t probably a big deal for most folks, but it isn’t exactly cloud computing. For example, you would not be able to access your passwords from a public workstation unless the Keepass application was on that workstation.

It would be nice if the Keepass app could be carried and opened from a thumbdrive, but I don’t think that is possible either…at least not as a cross-platform option.

I always thought have a google document with all your usernames/passwords would have been handy and accessible without nothing else beside a internet connection. However, many people aren’t convinced google docs is secure enough for this use.

I think that you are much better off with a locked spreadsheet on your local drive and c&p by hand rather than giving an outside entity all of your access information.

I’ve seen Wonderlife.com, and it seems pretty good. Careful about storing everything in one place, and backing everything up elsewhere.

Best,

RB

True, it may be the end of their company, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and it’d also be the loss of all your passwords. Imagine they fire a system administrator and in anger he takes the entire database of customer information with him, and sells it to someone else.

Yeah, he probably killed the company, but now who has access to your bank account?

Even without the disgruntled employee — what if a hacker gets access to the machine on which the customer database is stored? This has happened plenty of times to other companies. Just because it’s disastrous for the company doesn’t mean it wont happen.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do all the fancy file transferring from computer to computer but it’s got a cool preview and search system .. so it works for me

I will say that for all those inane websites that need a password I think PasswordMaker (http://passwordmaker.org/) can be an excellent too.

+1 for the TrueCrypt recommendation above.

I wouldn’t trust anything other than an open source app with encryption. If it’s open source you can verify that the encryption is strong and there are no backdoors (well I can’t do it, but other people can and do). With proprietary software you just have to take the vendors’ word for it.

I also use Syncback (another freebie) to sync multiple folders to my Dropbox folder…saving me the trouble of keeping everything in the Dropbox folder.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/risks_of_cloud.html

Before your make your move “into the cloud”, be sure to take into account the risks associated with it.

Quotes from the above linked NY Times op-ed:

“The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.” … “If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you.” … “Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law.” etc.

Do you *really* want to “move into the cloud”?

Thanks again!

In other words, I can edit a Word file on one, save it, then edit it from another machine. If I’m at home and find a PDF that will be useful for work, I just copy it into my Dropbox folder and it’s on my work desktop the next day. This works with mp3s, pictures, and any kind of file you can save on a computer.

J.D. implied as much when he said it was a complement to Google Docs — it’s not a replacement to Google Docs; instead it offers additonal features not present in Google Docs.

With regards to security, neither of these products were touted as increasing your security. One is a password keeper (like a “safe” for all your logins and passwords) and the other is online storage/sync service. Both carry risks: with the password keeper, all your passwords are stored in an encrypted file on your computer (safer than nothing, but probably still crackable). With Dropbox, your files will be stored on their server (this is required for the syncing function). That said, I wouldn’t use Dropbox for any sensitive information like Quicken files, but in both cases these utilities provide convenience that may be useful for your daily workflow. Evaluate for yourselves: if you only work off one computer, Dropbox is kind of pointless.

J.D., thanks for the article. These computer utilities are interesting to learn about.