I don’t know about you but I need passwords daily – hell even hourly. To login to clients FTP sites, to login to CMS’s, PayPal accounts, MySQL databases.At any one time I have about 10 current passwords running round my head.
Then – boom – like a bolt out of blue I’ll get a request for either some work on an old web site – or a client who’s forgotten how to login to SagePay.
So what I would normally do is trawl through all of my old emails where they might have sent me a copy of their login credentials (and I might have had enough forethought to mark with a reg flag in my inbox so I knew it was actully something important) – but all in all it would take minutes of my precious time, and distract me from the matter in hand.
Imagin my horror when one of the agencies I work for asked for a spreadsheet of all the FTP logins, Zen Cart logine & hosting logins for their set of clients! Aaargh!! To collate that would take days…. I complained!
But do you know what? It didn’t actually take that long at all. I sent them back an Excel spreadsheet, with each clients details on a separate tab, and each sheet contains every password, username & url link one could possibly need to manage their online sites.
So now I have done the same for ALL my current clients – everytime a new client signs up – he/she immediately gets a new tab and I can just copy and paste the relevant detail into their tab.
OK it doesn’lt always look pretty – but its always to hand – evidenced by the fact that its almost always open on my machine.
I have taken the basic security precaution of password protecting the spreasheet in case it fell into unwanted hands – but I think I can manage to remeber one password.
It would be interesting to know any other developers tips for managing this issue
We (moresoda) do something similar. All of our passwords are contained in a spreadsheet but it is contained in a password protected Mac disk image because this provides much stronger encryption. Give it a try, it's still only one password.