I’m sure you, like myself, have a few hundred passwords which I use on a fairly regular basis.  I sure hope that you shy way from a single password across all sites or a template based password where you reuse the same password but switch up a single digit or two.  Both of which are generally considered a very bad idea, especially when dealing with your online banking or similar sites.

In the past, I tried to move my entire life and toolset onto a Pen drive.  I have had a varying level of success across the board with it failing miserably with the larger tools like Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, and similar applications.  Typically those that have a heavy dependency on the registry.  In my perfect world everything would be local configuration files -this push to the registry (away from ini files) was a mistake IMHO.

For the longest time there was really only a single solution in the marketplace for reliable and safe Password Management tools.  That was RoboForm from Siber Systems.  It was so vital for me that I purchased their USB Version “RoboForm2Go”.  Over these past few years it treated me quite well and I still highly recommend using it for those that want an offline/portable installation-free solution.  For example if your one of those paranoid (safe) types that don't want some external site hosting your credentials…

A few months ago I realized that the majority of my daily use of my “Portable environment” was specifically for RoboForm and nothing else.  The ole 80-20 rule applies.  I took a good long look at that fact and decided that I wanted to minimize the hassle of carrying around the USB Pen drive, getting it running, etc.. on a daily basis.  I also noticed that I would have liked to share this data with a few machines, simultaneously.  This forced me into looking into an online solution.  At a minimum it would plug into Firefox and store all passwords (safely) on a remote site; and be reliable/available 24x7.  A colleague recommended me to check out LastPass.  Since this met my minimum requirements, and then some I decided to give it a run for its money.

I can safely say that I have managed to completely make the transition to LastPass with no issues.  The online service is extremely reliable and their FireFox and IE integration is stellar.

I also find myself using the Windows Mobile version of their product.  It needs work but it provides easy access to my data with a few clicks – you will need to upgrade to their premium product for this to work – its only $1 per month and you get a bunch of devices supported plus a few other “features”.

Great job done by the LastPass team.

1 Comment

• ctrlaltdl said Thursday, July 15, 2010 3:00:07 PM

  I've been using KeePass. It's open-source and best of all it's free. It works on Windows, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and others.