How to Manage all your Passwords on USB Thumb Drive

Do you have a crap ton of passwords to remember? Do you use the same passwords on on your log in sites just so you can easily remember them? Well let me save you from your misery, today I will show you how to use a free password manager to keep all your passwords on a USB thumb drive so you can have all your passwords with you when you’re on the move.

Download Portable Keepass. There are two versions of Keepass, one for the desktop and a portable version and in order to put all our passwords on a USB flash drive we need the portable version.

Plug in a USB thumb drive into your computer.

Locate the Portable Keepass zip file that you just downloaded and right click it and choose “Extract All”. Now click “Browse” to locate the USB thumb drive to extract the files on. There should be three files extracted. Keepass.exe is the program we use to store and manage all the passwords. KeePass.chm is a guide and tutorial file, and the last file on there is the license agreement.

Alright now that we have our password manager installed on the USB thumb drive we can start using it.

Click on the KeePass.exe file on the usb flash drive. We need to create our new password database. Click “File” from the main menu and select “New”. You will be asked to put in a password, this is your Master password which will unlock the database to all your other passwords. So all you need to do is remember this one Master password, I would recommend using a sentence that relates to you and easy to remember like “myveryfirstdoglikespizza”. Do not forget your Master password! This is your only way of unlocking all your passwords.

Click “OK” when done, now you will need to enter your Master password again to proceed.

Now we can start saving passwords, there is a main category on the left hand side which by default has there’s a General folder with Windows, Network, Internet, eMail, and Homebanking. We can always add a folder or category by right clicking and selecting the right options. But for now I will use what they have to save my first password.

For my first password I want to save it under “eMail” so I would click on it once to highlight it in blue and then select the fourth icon at the top which has a key and a green dot on top to add a password I want to save under this category.

Now I will enter all my info for this eMail password entry I want to save and hit “OK” when finished.

Now click the save icon which is the third icon at the top menu to save what you just did. Now you will get a window ask you where you want to save the “Database.kdb” file. This is the magical file that holds all your passwords. I like to save it on the same USB thumb drive so I can have all my passwords with me wherever I go, that is the whole point right. So find the thumb drive and save it in there.

I now have my first password saved under eMails. Go test it out, you can click and drag the user name and password into the boxes of the web site you want to enter.

Those are the basic steps to get you started on managing and saving passwords on a thumb drive and the best part it’s free, except for the thumb drive of coarse.

Note: The next time you want to open Keepass go to the USB drive, click the Keepass.exe and click on the second icon to open your existing database.kdb file of passwords. Or you can also go to File > Open. Now locate the Database.kdb file on your usb thumb drive. I have made the mistake of clicking the first icon (New) and overwritten my existing one and lost all my passwords that way. Poor me.