How To: Use 1Password in a restricted work environment

scorwitz

Hello,



I'm strongly considering One Password for myself and my mother. Here are the things that prevent me from using it. Can you please tell me if these are legitimate fears and how one gets around them?



1. My computer dies and the hard drive is not longer accessible, neither are any of my backups.

2. I'm at work, behind a strong and strict firewall that inhibits access to Dropbox and a lot of other sites and I want to log into a site that I now don't know the password for.

3. ALL USB ports on all computers in my company have been disabled so that even if I plug in a thumb drive, it won't load anything.



Thank you

khad

Welcome to the forums, scorwitz.



Backups are an important part of any good computing hygiene. 1Password is no different in this regard. We recommend a backup strategy that includes both on- and offsite backups. If your house burns down, you don't want your only backups to be inside it along with your computer. This is just standard computer hygiene and applies equally to your 1Password data.



We recommend Dropbox syncing which can also serve as a [i]pseudo[/i] offsite backup. I say pseudo because Dropbox is really only intended for syncing not backup. It is possible that wiping out your data on your hard drive could wipe it out on Dropbox depending on the scenario, so a good offsite backup strategy is still recommended. This can be as simple as including your mobile device(s) in Dropbox syncing. That way, if your house does burn down and you lose your data both on your computer and the onsite backups, you still have all your data in 1Password on your iPhone that you had with you in your pocket when you left the house.



If you are unable to use Dropbox at work, you can put a copy of your data file on a USB flash drive and access the data from there using the [url="http://help.agile.ws/1Password3/1passwordanywhere.html"]1PasswordAnywhere[/url] feature.



If you are unable to use a USB flash drive at work, you can email a copy of your data file to yourself and access the data using 1PasswordAnywhere.



If you are unable to open the attachment, you can just pull out your iPhone, look up the password in the 1Password iOS app, and manually enter it. Using pronounceable passwords will make this easier if your employer has so heavily restricted your computer usage.



Substitute Android or Windows Phone 7 device for iPhone as applicable.



If all else fails, there is always [url="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt"]RFC 1149[/url]. Though it does not scale very well if your data file is larger in size.



I hope that helps. Please let me know. <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />