Since I seem to be on a roll lately with password related posts, and since I linked to PasswordSafe in my last article about Good Password Practices, I thought I would post a Cool Tools entry about it too, because it definitely belongs on your kit!  A quick synopsis for anyone who doesn’t already know (go read the Good Password Practices article!), PasswordSafe is a nifty open source application that allows you to store your passwords in an encrypted database.  It offers some neat-o features like password history tracking (every time you change a password, it keeps a record of x number of old ones, just in case), you can group by category and store notes and more, all safely encrypted in one single file.  It’s a great tool, and a must have.

There is another tool that was mentioned by a reader called Keepass, and although I am not near as familiar with it, I have used it in the past since it runs on Linux among other things.  PasswordSafe is a Windows app, I just use it under Wine when I need it on Linux.  Either way, the point is the same, plain text files and password protected Excel spreadsheets art out baby, encrypted databases are in.  Keep your passwords safe!