In Part 1 of this three part series, we talked about using Cloud Services for backups. In Part 2, we’ll talk about how you can use the cloud to keep track of the myriad passwords you end up collecting and how you can start creating better passwords to protect you from attacks. All this without risking storing your passwords in the open on someone else’s server, and always giving you a secure way to download a local backup.
Most of us have accounts all over the Internet, and most of them use some kind of username and password to let us access our account. It may seem that the only way to keep track of them is to use the same password for most of the accounts. Maybe you use a different one for your bank and a few other places, but it just becomes impossible to remember a different password for each site. You could keep them all on Post-Its along your monitor, but hopefully you know that’s not a good idea. So using a tool of some sort is a great way to get around this. Several years ago I started using the password manager built into my browser to track passwords, and it was a great burden lifted. I still used the same username and password on many sites, simply because I was lazy and didn’t want to create a new one. But I used harder passwords more often and they were all remembered for me. About a year ago, I started using a free service call LastPass to keep track of my passwords, and it has changed the way I work with passwords forever.
Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords”
If you haven’t heard of “the cloud”, you probably haven’t been paying attention to all of the online services that are cropping up online. If you’ve used Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, or any of the thousands of online tools available today, you’ve used the cloud. It’s a way of saying that the things you put on those sites are stored “somewhere”, but you don’t know, or need to care, where it’s stored. It’s just in the clouds. I’ve always been a little hesitant of putting things “in the cloud”.