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Comment by joecode | Hacker News Reader

Exactly my strategy, too. Anyone else do this?

No. I simply have a different password for every site. I use a tool called 1passwd to generate and remember all those passwords for me.

That tool backs up its (encrypted) password db to my Dropbox folder. It also backs up to an iPhone app. So I think the chances of losing all my passwords are pretty slim. And, now, I don't care whether one site loses my password, since all my passwords are unique.

what's your Dropbox password?

That's stored in my iPhone backup.

Also, my dropbox is set up on my mac mini too.

In order to lose my passwords, I need to lose, at the same time:

1) my mac mini

2) my macbook pro

3) my iphone

Even then I would be able to recover things somehow, because my email goes through a third-party gateway, and I know the guy who runs it, so if I really do lose everything, I can contact him and ask him to reset my password on that gateway, and then log in to my email via that gateway.

I think the chances of losing my passwords are fairly slim.

No, I have one slightly-convoluted-but-simple-enough-to-keep-in-my-head method of generating a password for a given site based on information about myself and the site along with some transformations.

For important passwords that I might forget, I apply another easily rememberable transformation, and write them down.

Yes, but I've basically only have one password that shrinks depending on how sensitive the information is.

Throw-away password: "ex@mpl3"

Email password: "ex@mpl3p@55"

Finance password: "ex@mpl3p@55w0rd!"

Historically passwords have often been truncated at 8 bytes, so that if the first 8 characters are equal the password is equivalent. This might bite you if you always add on to the end of a long base password like this. Perhaps a variable prefix instead of a suffix?

I hope everyone does this.

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