1Password securely saves your passwords on Macs
I have an insane number of website accounts and profiles to keep track of. It goes with the territory of one who makes his living in the virtual world. Between my own profiles on dozens of social media sites, various email accounts, the blogs I own, banking and online bill paying sites, web hosting accounts, and the client work I do – it can truly get nuts sometimes.
The problem is twofold. First I need to keep the passwords someplace that’s organized where I can find them all. Quickly. The old paper and pencil password log I kept back in the day wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Then there’s the security issue. Paper and pencil is a bad idea. Even worse is keeping a spread sheet or text document on your computer with all your passwords in it!
Secure AND Easy
Fortunately 1Password keeps track of my passwords for me while keeping them secure at the same time. It was one of the very first purchases I made when I got the first Mac here at SuccessCREEations and at just under $35 for a single license is arguably some of the best money I spent getting started.
I’ve been using 1Password for about a year now and the program is easy to use, secure, and saves me countless hours hunting for my passwords.
1Password Makes Browsing More Secure
With all the social media sites that folks can join the the temptation can be strong to just use a standard password on all these different accounts. That’s a very bad idea.
And with 1Password it’s unnecessary too.
Because the program securely remembers all your passwords for you, there is no longer any need for passwords that are easy to remember. Now you can use truly random character strings for your passwords and still have them available in all your browsers.
Even better
Coming up with a random sequence to much bother for you? No worries.
1Password can generate truly random strings for you within parameters you can set. All you have to do is click your mouse and get remarkably strong unique passwords for every account you have.
That makes it much less likely that someone will hack your online information. Even if one site were to be compromised the damage is isolated to that account because all your others have randomly different passwords.
And they are even working on a web based version that will give access to this great service for Windows users too. Very nice.
Check out this video. If you are on a Mac and have too many passwords to manage, 1Password is worth a look.
Thanks for the review Chris! I’m glad you like 1Password as much as we do
Cheers!
–Dave Teare
Co-author of 1Password
Cheers for the info dude, its really helpful!
great tip about password protection…
thank you
Chris, I have a mac. watched the video. It sounds good. But one thing worries me. I lose my computer. I have a crash. Software glitches out on me. Whatever. Now I don’t know any of my passwords. In one fell stroke, I’m locked out of everything. Particularly frightening are the generated passwords. I never even knew what they were.
The only way around this, as far as I can tell, is if 1 password allowed me to print out my passwords on paper to be stored in a safe location in the event of an emergency. Now I only have to do that now and again in order to be safe. I know it’s trying to be secure, but I would even keep this on my computer in some unknown file location. Any provision for this scenario?
(I’ll try to get back here to see if you answer. If you don’t mind sending me an email I’d be so grateful)
Excellent tip, thanks.
RL Preacher, Good question. There are a couple potential solutions. 1Password ties into the OS X keychain for your user account so backing that keychain up backs up all your 1Password generated passwords.
If you are on Leopard then you can backup your passwords via Time Machine.
If you have a .mac account (now MobileMe) your 1Password generated passwords should be backed up there automatically. I’m not totally certain about that ’cause I don’t have a .mac account myself.
Or you can manually back up your passwords onto another machine or a flash drive, etc.
So backing up passwords with 1Password will happen right along with the backups you are already doing, assuming you are backing up your passwords now, that is.
I need this – I knew it was a big mistake to switch from Mac when i entered the corporate world after college. Now I have to write my passwords on paper
cool stuff… too bad i dont have a mac. do they have a pc version of that? o_O
I don’t use MAC, but I have a similar program for passwords and these tools are invaluable. I won’t name the tool (in case you are promoting this for for other reasons) but to have a program that keeps all of your passwords together, organized, and is accessed through a master password is essential for anyone doing a lot of webwork. The program I have will actually go the the site and enter in the user/pass infor for you (works for most sites.)
There’s a tool within Firefox that has all of your passwords stored. It’s actually not quite safe, as if you go on someone else’s computer, you can easily see all of their saved passwords for all of their sites. Luckily no one goes on this computer but me!
I have one works wonders!
I am on a PC so my vote goes for Comodo Password Vault. I’m not sure whether it’s available in Mac but, from what I’ve heard from my Mac friends, 1Password does the trick.
I used to use Web Confidential because it had clients for Windows, Mac and Palm. But these days I’m 100% on the Mac and iPhone, so 1Password is about the best thing out there.
worth the read, great advice and tip on password protection, great gain of knowledge