Manage Your Passwords

How many passwords and user names do you have to keep track of? The answer is loads of them. Most people resort to keeping a written list of passwords, which can be very risky as anyone can get his hands on that list. Some people use a common password for all the places they need to enter it, which again is not a good solution. Now, with Password Safe you can keep a list of passwords securely encrypted on your computer. A single safe combination unlocks them all. Here's how to create, manage and keep your passwords safe and secure using a utility called Password Safe, which can be downloaded from

http://sourceforge.net.

Create a safe combination



When you first start up Password Safe, it will ask you to create a new database and a ‘Safe Combination' for it or, in other words, it will ask you to create a password for the encrypted database file that will store all your passwords. The combination is case sensitive and can include letters, punctuation and numbers. This Safe Combination keeps all your passwords safe, so don't use something that's easy to guess. Password Safe even warns you if the combination provided by you is not strong enough and advises you to come up with a new combination. Once you've chosen your combination, type it in the box marked ‘Safe Combination', then again in the box marked ‘Verify'. Then click on Ok. 

Enter passwords



After you've created your combination, you can start entering passwords. Just click on the ‘Add Entry' button in the menu bar. Password Safe lets you arrange passwords in groups for easier management. So, enter a Group name, next enter a Title, which could be a descriptive name for the website or network share you are storing the password for. Then enter the username and the password itself. You can use the ‘Notes' field to enter any other information about the password that will be displayed alongside the username and title in the window. Enter as many passwords as you want into the program. To view the username list arranged by groups, go to the View menu and select the Tree view.

Retrieve passwords



Password Safe does not reveal the passwords to you on the screen but copies them to the clipboard. To copy a password to the Windows clipboard, just double-click on the desired title or highlight the title and select ‘Copy password to clipboard menu item'. You can now paste the password into whichever form you want. You can also copy the username by selecting ‘Copy username to clipboard' under the Edit drop-down menu in the Password Safe interface. For security, the clipboard will be cleared whenever you close Password Safe.

Once you are done creating the username/password entries and exit the program for the first time, Password Safe will prompt you to save the database file to a location on your hard disk. Select any location and give a filename. Now, all your passwords are encrypted and stored in this file. The next time you start the program, it will locate that file and ask for the ‘Safe Combination' you had set earlier, or ask you to create a new one, before opening the password database.

Ankit Kawatra