According to a study conducted in America in August of this year nearly 3 in 5 adults have 5 or more unique online passwords to remember. It’s no wonder we struggle to remember them all.

Believe it or not, there’s even a recognised psychological explanation for your inability to remember all your passwords and the subsequent effect it has on your psyche. Yes, indeed, you might be suffering from password fatigue. This “disorder” can be defined as the feeling experienced by people who have to remember a large amount of passwords as part of their daily routine. This could include any password or code – from the code for your bicylcle’s lock to your pc or atm pin code. Read more on password fatigue here..

However, if you can’t remember your average 5 passwords, don’t panic, there’s hope for you yet. There’s software to help you remember on the days your grey matter struggles to keep up with all the information.

The most popular and possibly best of these is KeePass Password Safe.

KeePass is free open source software enabling you to manage all your passwords in a safe and secure manner. With this programme, you store all your passwords in one central database and lock it with only one secure master key or password. Storing your passwords in one central place behind a secure password is much safer than using the same password for all your programmes and applications, because you’re worried you might forget them!

Another additional advantage of KeePass is it’s usability on most platforms. Although it was originally intended for usage on Microsoft Windows, it can also be used with ease on Linux, Mac OS and various cell phone platforms.

The software has various functions, amongst others one able to generate passwords automatically – handy when you’ve run out of ideas for a strong password. Read more on KeePass here.

If you’re interested in other software available for password management, www.smashingapps.com has a few suggestions.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2012 at 9:19 am and is filed under General, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.