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You have a password for the online banking, one for your Apple ID, one to log into your retirement amount. Your password for your bank has to have have at least one numeric number, but can’t start with a number and it can’t have any more than two of the same characters found in your username. Your retirement account must include at least 3 numbers and one special character but they can’t be consecutive.

Does this sound familiar? In the perfect world we would only need one password, but unfortunately for security purposes and as hackers get better at what they do password strength has become critical and part of our everyday lives. The hassle with this is that most sites have their own sets of rules for password strength leaving many of us to peck away at our keyboards or devices in a sometimes endless game of “remember how you manipulated your favorite password 16 different ways and can’t remember if your banking site used the password with the capitalization or the one with the ampersand”.

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For a very long time I will admit my method of keeping track of my usernames and passwords was the stickies program on my Mac, much to the dismay of our IT manager! While stickies are easily accessed they are not secure and I do not recommend this method. Where you should keep them is in your keychain. You can access your keychain through applications and then utilities. Once you are in your keychain you can manually add preferred sites, accounts and passwords you wish to store. Another huge benefit is secure notes. Secure notes allow you store additional confidential information. Keychain is safe and secure because in order to view any of the passwords stored there you need to enter your administrator password. Within keychain you can make sure to safely and securely keep your passwords, and when you forget if you needed that capitalization or ampersand in your password you can simply open keychain and enter into the search field the website for which you need to confirm the password.

Now what if you don’t have a mac? The loss of passwords, and most often your Apple ID password is a huge concern with users of iOS devices only. Luckily there is an easy solution for that, iCloud and “iCloud keychain.”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204085 Simply go to settings, iCloud and then select keychain. Your iOS device will begin to store your logins and websites. Additionally you can add specific websites and passwords manually to your phone or iPad under **safari** and then selecting **passwords**. This is also where you would look if you can’t remember login information.

Recording safely your logins and passwords is an often overlooked step, especially when users of iOS devices accidentally have the device damaged or lost. Saving your passwords safely and using iCloud keychain can avert your being logged out of accounts.

On a plane today and back home to Key West which is only a little more laid back. It is like being in a time machine leaving Las Vegas in the morning and back in the Keys by dinner.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

_Don,Emily, Dean and Scott_

_Dear Friends_,

I am in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show and it is bigger than ever. My Apple watch is happy with all the walking I am doing but my feet are not feeling the love. The show is a great way to see what is on the horizon and of course, I had meetings interspersed with walking the show floor. Naturally, the meetings were far apart so I spent a lot of time walking or on buses or cabs.

This show is pretty different from previous years but still is window to future products. See my short report below and I will follow up next week in Kibbles with a more in-depth look. This week’s kibbles exclusive special is a “refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air with a 512GB hard drive bundled with Applecare and a 2TB Time Capsule for $1759.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002113/special-save-150-on-refurbished-mac-bundle-and-keep-it-safe The MacBook Air is one of my most favorite laptops and this refurbished bundle is a great way to upgrade your mac and ensure your data is secure for the new year!

The Holidays are here and I am sure many of your are busy making memories, thinking about others and capturing as many picture-perfect moments that you can. While you’re busy bustling around, are you taking the time to think about these memories? What would happen if you couldn’t go back and look up those moments? Perhaps now is the time to think about a gift for yourself and taking the time to ensure that all of the perfect moments you are capturing on video and in pictures are being safely stored on your computer.

I know we talk about this all the time, but it’s surprising how many of us out there keep putting this important step of backing up to the side! The Holidays are the time with some of the best memories, and so many of us are capturing once in a lifetime moments. The last thing anyone wants is to have something happen to those photos. There are so many options for backing up your computer and your important files it can be a little overwhelming. There is iCloud, cloud-based storage solutions from countless companies, traditional external hard drives for back up and more! My preferred backup solutions are a combination of cloud backup and physical hard drives. It might seem a little redundant, but better to be safe than sorry when it comes to important documents and memories.

For me, iCloud and an external hard drive are my preferred options for backing up. I use my iCloud account to keep my daily life in order, contacts and calendars most importantly. I also use iCloud for storing some of my most important memories and files, select baby photos of my kids and some important documents. The kind of things that should the worst case happen and I lost my computer or drives due to theft or fire I still have copies in the cloud. My preference for my backups is using Time Machine and my “**Seagate**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/85305/seagate-backup-plus-slim-portable-drive-usb-3-0-2tb-blue hard drives. I keep a different drive for each of my computers and perform fairly regular backups, I am not perfect, so sometimes they are not as regular as I would like. But utilizing these drives allows me to ensure that I have entire backups of my files and data readily available. Before I started to use iCloud I would also have back ups drives of my Time Machine back up, yes, I was and am that paranoid about loosing photos of my kids. I still have a small 20gb drive that contains my oldest daughter’s first year of photos, even though I know all the photos are on my computer and backed up I still won’t delete that drive.

In the last year we have seen a rise in alternative cloud storage and mobile storage solutions. Many companies like “*Seagate*”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/?mmfg%5B0%5D=Seagate and “*LaCie*”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/?mmfg%5B0%5D=LaCie have portable drives that allow users to access information wirelessly while on the go. This is a great solution for families with large media libraries for movies. The “**Lacie Fuel**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/85520/lacie-fuel-wireless-battery-powered-mobile-hd-wifi-usb-3-0-1tb is great for just this. Have a long road trip? Load up the drive and the family can access the files from their iPhones or iPads quickly and easily without taking up storage on their devices. Another and perhaps more practical solution is the “**Seagate Personal Cloud**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002041/mac-the-halls-save-20-on-seagate-personal-cloud-home-media-storage-3tb. This drive allows you to back up everything on your computer and access it from anywhere! No need to carry that back up drive along with you, and with tons of storage options little worry about not having enough space. So this holiday season remember, backing up is just as important as capturing those memories.