Using Password Safe with Dropbox Deux

In my second installment of "Using Password Safe with Dropbox," I'll mostly be covering how to install and use Dropbox followed by integrating your Password Safe into the Dropbox experience. If you haven't gotten started with Password Safe yet, I suggest you backpedal and take a look at my previous entry.

When last we met, we had completed installing Password Safe to a folder, started a new PSafe database, and were ready to get going with Dropbox. Hopefully in this interim you've had some time to get accustom to using Password Safe, as I've said many a time before that the program is very useful but not exactly easy to learn. Familiarity with PSafe isn't a prerequisite for getting Dropbox working certainly, but as these blog entries are specifically regarding doing both it would kind of make sense. Feel free to refer back to the previous entry if you're lost on any of these steps that specify what we did with our Password Safe installation and database.

Remember last time we grabbed both install files from the title of this blog entry, one for PSafe and one for Dropbox. The links are still active in this blog entry as well, so if you need either one go ahead and make it happen. Today we're most concerned with Dropbox, so you should have something like this:



Fire it up (double click it) and we'll start installing Dropbox. Once again, sell your unborn children to the software makers:



Pick the install location. We're good with the default, so hit Install:



Watch it do its thing:



And that's that! Dropbox just needs to know whether you have an account with them yet or if you need to make a new one. For the purposes of this tuturiol, I'm assuming you don't have a Dropbox account and need to make one. So, let's do that:



Next we'll fill out our name, email, password, and identify the computer we're running this instance of Dropbox from:



Now, before you cry "OOH, password! I'll bust out Password Safe!!" stop and listen for a sec. This is where we start getting a little Escher on things. Since our Password Safe database is going to be stored in our Dropbox, what happens when you want to make a new Dropbox install (e.g. on another computer) and can't access your PSafe database in order to do that? In other words, if your PSafe database is the only thing that knows what your Dropbox account password is, how are you going to get to that when you don't have access to Dropbox? It's a little confusing, but there's a simple solution: just make your Dropbox account password different than your One Password to Rule Them All and don't store the account in your PSafe database. Now, that means you're going to have TWO Passwords to Rule Them All, aren't you? Well, sort of. You really won't access your Dropbox account much once it's up and ready on any given computer. Dropbox is very slick in that in runs everything in the background and never prompts you for much of anything, so in all likelihood you won't even be entering your Dropbox account information much after this install (and any subsequent installs you make elsewhere). Still, if you're going to keep your Password Safe database in your Dropbox, locking it down too much means you could be in hot water if you lose access to Dropbox (which would be bad).

So, to summarize:

1. Set up a new Dropbox account with a different (and memorable) password than your One Password to Rule Them All. (References again: here and here)
2. Being really smart would be to add an entry to your PSafe database that stores your Dropbox account information, but don't rely on PSafe to enter this info if necessary (i.e. know what your Dropbox account password is from memory).
3. Keep your PSafe database in more than one place!

This last point will help you get out of a jam if necessary. I would be careful with where you keep your PSafe database obviously, but having a backup copy is absolutely necessary (and would be even if we weren't using Dropbox too).

So, after all that let's take another look at that Dropbox account setup:



Name and email are obvious (I assume Dropbox will let you recover a lost password using email, so that's a possible backdoor as well), and we've discussed extensively already what kind of password to use here. Computer Name just identifies to Dropbox what machine you are running on, so when you've set up Dropbox on multiple computers the online interface knows what's what. After we've gotten all this, hit Next:



The installer has a nice tour built-in that I recommend you go through if you haven't looked at Dropbox on their website already. It explains how Dropbox works and gives you lots of good background info. If you go through the whole tour (by always clicking Next) or click Skip, you'll get to the final setup window:



This final window has one more option, to choose your Dropbox location. By default your Dropbox goes under My Documents:



For most folks this will work out fine. In our case since we'll be moving our Password Safe database into here and that's where we initially put our database (if you were listening to me), it makes it even easier. Understand what's happening here: any file or folder under the "My Dropbox" folder will now be synced automatically to your Dropbox account online (up to 2GB for free). There are some other nifty features that Dropbox provides but I won't get into too much of that here (you can read about it and find out on your own). I will say that the special folder "Public" should be obvious and also that you DON'T want your PSafe database to go here.

So, when Dropbox is running you'll see this icon in your tray notification area:



The green arrow means Dropbox has finished syncing, and a spinny blue icon means it is currently syncing. If you look at your Dropbox folder as well, you can see the same icons that tell you what is synced online and what is currently transferring. For the most part Dropbox is terribly fast and syncs online in the blink of an eye, even between machines (it's fun to save a file to your Dropbox on one machine, then watch on another as it is synced without a hitch). You can right click this tray icon for a context menu that lets you go online to your Dropbox (in a web browser) or look at the local folder on your computer (the default double click action on this icon opens your local Dropbox). There are lots of other neat things about Dropbox to discover, but let's get on with getting our Password Safe database in there.

Go to your Dropbox (again, double clicking the tray icon automatically does this) and make a new folder called "Password Safe" (or some derivitive thereof):



This is where we're going to store our PSafe database (and only the database). Leave this window open, then jump back to the folder where we installed Password Safe on our computer:



What we need out of here is just the .psafe3 file, whatever you named it when we created it last time. You want to move (not copy) this file into the folder called "Password Safe" that we just created in our Dropbox:



If you're keeping all this stuff under My Documents like my example is doing, when you drag your PSafe database to your Dropbox it will move it and not copy it anyway. The importance of this is that any changes you make to your PSafe database will be synced to your Dropbox, and not a local file. This doesn't mean you shouldn't occasionally make a backup of your PSafe database elsewhere (you should), but it will ensure that your main database lives in your Dropbox so you can access it from any computer you Dropbox from (like a work machine and home machine).

So now we've hopefully got something like this:



Our actually PSafe database file (the .psafe3 file) is there in our Dropbox. In this image you see some other files as well; I have the installer for Password Safe here just in case, and some backup files as well. Just FYI, the .bak files are manually created backups (while running Password Safe, hit Manage and then create a backup file) and the .ibak files are the incremental backups that PSafe makes on its own. These latter you don't really need to worry much about, they're just there. So now we have our PSafe database in our Dropbox. Woo!

Go ahead and run Password Safe again:



Recall that we're running Password Safe locally, but linking to our database that is now stored in our Dropbox. Really, PSafe doesn't care as it sees the Dropbox folder as just another folder. However, since we moved our PSafe database from its initial location, Password Safe might yell at us:



No worries here, it's just because we put our database in our Dropbox. Hit Search, then navigate to your Dropbox and select your database again. Enter your One Password to Rule Them All, and your PSafe'ing it again, all with secure syncing to your Dropbox in the cloud and accessible from any machine you have Dropbox installed on.

A couple more notes to this: I've noticed in using my PSafe database with Dropbox that it tends to be constantly "using" a file. This is only if you leave your database open most of the time (which I usually do during the day). Dropbox thinks a file is constantly changing that it needs to sync, so you'll get the blue icon all the time. This doesn't seem to hurt the operation of either PSafe or Dropbox, however I will caution this: close your PSafe database when you're done with it.

In other words, I wouldn't risk having your database open on one computer and then trying to access and change it from another. This may work, but what worries me is possible data corruption in your PSafe database and that could be bad. The last thing you want is to mess up your database in any situation (which is why you back it up, right?).

That's pretty much it for using Password Safe with Dropbox. Now that we've been through all that, the best analogy I can give you to what I used to do is run PSafe from a folder on a USB drive along with storing my database on that drive. This worked for me for years, but it also meant that if I didn't carry my USB drive around all the time with me and I needed to access some site that only my PSafe database knew how to get into, I was SOL. Dropbox also has other advantages as it acts like a USB drive in the cloud; being able to log into it from some foreign computer means I can access any of the files I store there (this latter reason is also why I tell you to know your Dropbox account password from memory). No more physical USB drive for me!

If you are willing to try the steps I've outlined (which include getting serious and up to speed with Password Safe, then trying Dropbox to have secure access to your PSafe database), you'll find a plethora of useful goodness when it comes to secure passwords and access to files from any computer. For me it has become the best of both worlds and I still can't believe I get to leave my USB drive at home all the time. If you do try this tutorial and have any questions, feel free to hit up the comments or shoot me a note at rothermels [at] gmail [dot] com.

Blog on.