KeePass has been mentioned a few times before, recommended to be your encrypted password database manager and I have been using it exclusively for all of my passwords for months. It’s a great tool to prevent your accounts from getting Gawkered. With an app on my phone (KeePassDroid), a portable version on my USB drive, and installed at both home and work, I didn’t think KeePass could get much better. To my pleasant surprise, there are two ways it gets better that I haven’t talked about before – better Firefox integration and a seamless synchronization service.
KeeFox
After the Auto-Type of KeePass had misfired one time too many (usually my fault because I had clicked elsewhere on my way to activate the Auto-Type), I looked around to see if there was anything that allowed for a tighter integration of KeePass and Firefox. That is when I found KeeFox. KeeFox bridges KeePass and Firefox. When you’re visiting a site that matches the URL of one of your entries, it will auto fill-in the fields from your database. If a site has multiple URLs where you might sign in, you can create an ‘Alternate URL’ field for the entry and it will then work to auto sign-in.
It has a toolbar that can act like bookmarks or can be turned off as well. If you sign in to a page that doesn’t have an entry in your database, KeeFox will prompt if you want it to automatically create one. KeeFox will take over for you instead of the Firefox password manager, keeping everything secure inside your encrypted database.
Synchronization Service
Having KeePass on a USB drive, phone, and home and work computers doesn’t do a whole lot of good if the database is out of date. If you add two entries to the database in two different locations, it’s just a nightmare waiting to happen. To carry the database to all of these places, I use Dropbox to host my database so it’s always accessible and kept up to date in all the different locations. It also holds a portable version of the app so I can get to KeePass in different situations. I figured using Dropbox would work fine, as long as I remembered to close out KeePass each time I left a location. Of course, I didn’t always remember to do that and soon I would have multiple versions of my password database floating around.
Fortunately, in that situation, you’re greeted with this prompt:
Using the top option, Synchronize, KeePass will load the server database and merge your local changes into it. Everything is in sync again! This is a great service and easily extends the portability of KeePass. This is a built-in function and automatically detects file differences like this when you hit the save button on your database, even if you haven’t made any changes locally but want to load the latest version from the cloud.
Have any other tips and tricks worth knowing for KeePass?