What would do if you lost all your logins and passwords tomorrow? You could spend the next 3 days clicking on "forgot username/password" buttons as your inbox fills up with password recovery mails but that wouldn't be much fun. Usually we do not think about things like this until something happens.
Unfortunately, that is like buying tornado insurance after your house has already been hit by one. Everyone recommends full backups and it is universally accepted that this is a good thing; ideally we recommend the same. However, we know that very few people actually implement and execute a full fledged backup strategy. If you decide not to backup your entire hard drive regularly, we recommend you at least backup your 1Passwd data on a regular basis.
Today, I am going to show you the how to backup all of your 1Passwd information so that it may be recovered in the event of a catastrophe.
1Passwd stores all of your web forms, identities, secure notes, and password history in a file called 1Passwd.keychain.This file is located underneath your User folder. The full path of my file is shown below.
Local backups of this file are performed automatically by 1Passwd. In fact, 1Passwd backs up this file twice a day and retains the last 31 days. That is a total of 62 backups! You can find all of your backups in the backup folder which is in the same folder as your 1Passwd.keychain file. Each backup file is appended with a generated number to give it a unique name.
The automatic backup system protects you against damage to your keychain file but not against hard drive failures. Therefore, it is recommended that you backup the entire Keychains folder to a remote location. This could be an external hard drive, a large USB key, your .Mac iDisk, or an online storage service.
Backing up this folder will protect your 1Passwd data from being lost. However, you will also want to make a backup of your 1Passwd license, preferences, and other goodies that the 1Passwd application created in this folder:
So now that we know what information needs to be backed up, I am going to use my iDisk to back it all up. First, I create a special folder on my iDisk for this purpose.
Next, I use Finder to drag and drop the folder referenced above to my new iDisk folder.
I now have a backup of all my 1Passwd data and licenses! I used the iDisk in the above example, but the destination could be any place other than your HD.
If you want to automate the process, you can create an Automator action like the one below to do this for you.
