Lately, I’ve experienced  2 incidents that frustrated me a lot. The curse sounds simple: lost data!

First, I lost my 1-hour or so of work through LibreOffice. I have to admit, word document management is one of few drawbacks, together with hardware support probably (? – music played in Windows seems to sound better than in Ubuntu though its support certainly keeps improving), of Linux compared to Windows as Libre and its predecessors Open Office still can’t match the fellow M. Office in Windows. One encountered this before should know how it feels like…

Second, I’ve lost an entire archive folder without having any back-ups at all. Then in an attempt to recover it, I almost lost my whole disk storage for some stupid ignorance. What a pity! At least I managed to get the later back.

These 2 curses show how poor my (files) management is considering I’m an developer.. So I decide to do some researches & make some changes. I considered signing up for an online auto backup for my local files but I know it wouldn’t gonna help before I manage my local files better.

Two of my major changes are files/folders management (store it securely, access it easily & never lose it) and password management. I’m gonna talk a little a bit about the later.

To this day, to be honest, I still store all my passwords in a text files and just-a-little-better on Google Drive.

I don’t know how you do it but Google Drive at first seems not a bad choice for me.

First it’s a cloud services meaning I could access it everywhere.
Second I use Two-Step Verification meaning no one could access it without literally stealing my phone – damn secure isn’t it? Since I accept the fact that if I could ever lose my google account, I would lose all my other accounts that stored inside, this process makes sense.

After doing some research, I realise this is not perfect as it seems to be:

1. Google Drive is a 3rd party services, Google could stop it anytime they want.
2. Google could sell our data – we never know.
3. Passwords are stored manually & in the plain text
which means I would eventually have to create my own passwords for each site
which would then make me tend to use short, easy to remember passwords and eventually the same password thorough a list of sites.

Then I find KeePass who as a dedicated software does an arguably much better job than the Google Drive who is supposed to be just an advanced online storage like Dropbox.

As for the security, Google 2-step auth seems pretty decent but how about when your friends wanna borrow your laptop and accidentally see sth they’re not supposed to see. For KeePass, you have to enter your master password everytime you login. This is sometimes irritating but is 100% safe. KeePass do everything an “cascadeur” like Google can’t and offer even great features! Go explore!

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As a dev, I know the secret shortcut Shift + Delete. But after a few catastrophes, I realize human errors won’t always happen but when it happens, it’s costly. I try not to be lazy again. I would just “soft” delete it first and later go to the bin and trash it. I’m trying and would never ever use Shift + Delete again.