Guard Your Password - Learn From My Experience.
The wise old toad says...
I almost lost my Steemit account by being careless about my password.
For the past few months our six-year-old computer has been having issues, such as randomly shutting down with no notice. Often times I was in the midst of creating a Steemit post. Luckily when I got back online my unpublished post was right where I had left off. Great feature of Steemit, by the way.
What is strange is that the other day I felt this strong urge to back up my Steemit password in a safe location. I am an idiot who stores sensitive passwords in a text file on our computer. I try to hide it among the files and give it an inconspicuous name, if that helps any. I had done the same with my Steemit password. Nonetheless, I decided to write my password on a card in pen and hide it in a location outside our home, in case I needed to refer to it at a later time. I did not notate what that password was for, in case someone found the card. It would appear to be meaningless characters with no identification.
Then later that same day, our computer took its last breath, and died.
It died in such a manner that no files could be retrieved from it. Everything was wiped out. Luckily I had done a system backup a year ago, so most of our documents and photos were spared. But I did lose a lot of recent items. My Steemit password would have been one of those casualties, had I not felt the urge to write it down earlier that day. And we all know from the day we started our Steemit accounts that there is no password recovery. I was so thankful I made that move. And now I know better than to rely on my computer alone to store valuable files.
I am sure some of you are thinking, "Duh, moron. Everyone knows that." But I am just a humble Midwesterner who is slow to grasp modern ideas.
Great post as this could happen to anyone. Passwords and captchas are the bain of my life . How older people cope i,ll never know
You can keep your passwords only on a price of paper but that would mean a lot of typing. You keep them only in memory but that would make them guessable. You can keep them on a computer that doesn't run servers and is behind two firewalls (your PC). By keeping them on the PC you can have really long passwords.
You wrote your Steemit password down? Wow, that must have taken a while :)
One other tip too, is you can put it in a text file, then save it on a flash drive or burn it to a CD.
Very good advice to back it up somewhere in case your HD dies! Thanks for the post :)
Yes, it was a lengthy process to write it down legibly. One thing I think about is the unfortunate event of our house burning down. That is why I like to store things in a completely different location, too. I suppose a fire safe would be a good idea.
Indeed.
Yikes, a good remind to keep backups (hard copy and digital!)
I also strongly recommend using a password manager. It is more secure than a text file on the computer, and you can store the encrypted backup of all your passwords on a USB key or even in a cloud service. If someone hacked that, they still would have to break the encryption of the backup which assuming you have strong master password is less of an issue. And also requires you to memorize one strong master password too.
Though given all the recent breaches, and widespread malware that can be silently installed on our personal computers, having an obfuscated paper backup is probably the best bet for reliability and statistical possibility of being compromised -- assuming it is not a sticky note taped under the keyboard ;-)
After reading your post, I wrote my password down with a pen :D
A great idea. It saved me!