When it comes to safely storing passwords and other sensitive information, there is a trade-off between security and
convenience.
Local password managers (on-site), which store your passwords in an encrypted vault on your system hard-drive, are the simplest and most convenient solution to your password security troubles. Two notable disadvantages to this approach:
- Hard-drive failures can cause you to lose access to your vault file
- The vault is not accessible across different devices
Most commercial password managers on the other hand store your passwords in an encrypted vault on a server far away. Although the idea of storing your passwords off-site can be a hard sell to some, this approach is immune to hard-drive failures and allows access to the vault across all your devices.
As for security, vulnerabilities are not uncommon in commercial password managers, most of them uncovered by security
researchers, but these do not immediately disqualify off-site password managers as a viable solution.
Bix seeks its own corner in the password manager world.
In my (probably biased) opinion, an on-site password manager is
your best bet. Regular backups (which you should be doing anyway) can protect against unexpected hard-drive
failures, and not having to worry about your passwords getting exposed in a data breach is a relief.
Naturally this means you lose the ability to access you passwords across devices. If cross-device access is an absolute
necessity, an off-site password manager is the way to go.
For all the paranoid folk out there, who don't want to solely rely on Bix (or any other digital password manager) to store all their account credentials, I would suggest a simple two-pronged approach:
An on-site digital password manager for convenience and a tangible password journal for confidence
This way, you're not putting all your eggs in one basket.
With that said, if password security isn't one of the things that haunts you at night, sticking to just a digital password manager, on-site or off-site, will suffice.