11
votes
Making the switch to Bitwarden, unsure how to go about it
I have had several accounts taken over, and decided I've had enough. I decided to use a password safe, which I've been wanting to do for years, and finally settled on Bitwarden because it's fully open-source.
The hangup is I'm unsure how to transition to it. I've logged some old email accounts I occasionally need to access, my new Netflix account (just got my own), and tildes, but I haven't changed my email password, for example (my email password is only used for email).
For anybody who has done this already, is it best to dig up all my accounts and jump over to bitwarden, or to switch them as I see/use them over time?
If you have all your old accounts/passwords saved in Chrome or Firefox you don't need to add them all manually: https://help.bitwarden.com/article/import-data/
I don't save my passwords, so I only have three in Firefox, but it would have been helpful.
Ah, that's rough then. But thankfully there are some helpful suggestions here already. And I would definitely second starting with your most used sites and then just working your way steadily through the rest as you find you need them.
p.s. If not using the browser, how did you store your passwords before, just in a text file or did you simply reuse passwords?
I had three main passwords I used, and would add capitalizations into them, and extra characters occasionally. So, I usually either left the account logged in on my browser, or used one of these passwords. The practice also started to look like it could catch up with me, prompting me to change it before that actually happened.
I went through all the accounts I could remember having and changed the passwords to a Bitwarden suggested one (14 chars, with numbers and symbols). Whenever I create a new account somewhere, I use Bitwarden to generate a password.
When I transitioned to a password manager I just added accounts when I needed them. I just used the web like I normally did and when I found a site that I didn't have saved I generated a new password for it. I think it is much easier to do this way.
I started out with adding my most used sites at once, then I continued with this method.
Like @ReapersGale said, get everything into the password manager as is, and then go through and update.
For me, I took it one step further and set up a catch-all email address with zoho (using a cheap, shit domain I don't use for anything else --- $1/m,) then every single site has a unique email address, e.g. netflix@shit.domain. If I start to get spam on that address, I simply change it to netflix2@shit.domain and filter out the old one.
I've only been doing this for a couple of months, but it's working like a dream.
Getting into a password manager seems daunting at first, but after about a week, you'll forget that you were ever manually entering anything.