RoboForm is a software password vault that you can use for your daily computer browsing and work. It saves your password and login pages as well as your personal information. It is a great place to put private information you may need from time to time in a “safenotes” area.
I've been using RoboForm for several years now. I've tried a couple of different password vaults, but find this software application to best suit my needs.
RoboForm Versions
Desktop version
This application started out as a desktop only edition. It was great as you login and set passwords you could save the login page, user id, and password with a simple click.
Next time back it only took one click and enter your master password the app filled your login form and then click the submit button to move on. It was a good time saver.
Note that you only have to enter the master password once, thereafter you had access to all passwords when needed. It resets if you computer sleeps or hibernates.
USB Drive Version
With the popularity of thumb drives a RoboForm To Go version was created. I jumped all over this one as I now could take my passwords with me to work, or on the road and be able to access the now 100 plus logins that I had accumulated.
Accessing a hotel computer to login to my airline account and change travel plans became a whole lot easer. I didn't have to remember or look up those various passwords and login pages. The dropdown menus made it really easy and saved me a lot of time.
The only thing was that syncing between the drive and the desktop version required some careful consideration as the license files were different and you could mess up your ability to get access.
RoboForm Everywhere – latest and greatest
SiberSystems has put a lot of effort into keeping this up to date. The release of RoboForm everywhere this year has been a major leap forward in ease of use.
This yearly fee version (currently $9.95 for 1st year, then 19.95/ year thereafter) is well worth the money. It's a one price, unlimited devices option.
It is what I now use and I'm absolutely delighted. I now have access to my passwords which are automatically sync'd between my home PC, my work PC, iPad, and iPhone. I even updated my USB drive, but I haven't had to use it in some time.
You have to establish a Everywhere online account which takes a little setup, but is fairly easy to do.
There have been numerous preference improvements and now you have one click fill and submit. But make sure you understand this as if you fill & submit then hit submit button it can cause errors with the website you are trying to enter.
Usage Tips
RoboForm isn't perfect, and you'll run across a couple of quirks that you'll need to work around. Watch for these.
Filling boxes
With the advent of prefill shaded from text, it can cause checking features to thing that the box is already filled. This seems to be most prevalent on banking websites. Some times you can make the fill work by first clicking in the box. Sometimes clicking in a second box will let it fill automatically.
Some sites have implemented a form type or method that RoboForm can't recognize. This happens occasionally for me and I use a couple of methods to handle this.
In the browser toolbar that has your passwords, identities, safenotes available the login may come up but not be able to fill the form. I hover over the login name and a popup box comes up and you can click edit to get to your user id and password. Then you can quickly cut and paste as needed. Same goes for the safenotes you can get to the notes and find the needed information.
Long Forms
You use your identities to fill many long form for orders and such. I have one identify that uses home and business addresses, which I use for shipping purposes. This causes a few enters in these forms to not be exactly as you may wish.
You can create separate identities which can be uses for different addresses or credit card input. This is worth your time to do.
Labeling Logins
One thing you may want to do is make sure when you first save a login and password that you label it clearly. I have currently 8 logins associated with various Google accounts and it can be confusing which one you need to use.
Toolbar
The toolbar gives you dropdown menus to get to logins, one click identity access. There's also a search passwords which can be a time saver. I'm approaching the 350 mark for logins and typing a few keystrokes gets me a few results that zero in on the right login.
You also have buttons for generating passwords (more letters, more characters, the harder to break) and syncing your passwords to your everywhere account.
Summary
I suggest you seriously checkout this software tool. There's a 30 day free trial so you can test it out. The overall pricing is very reasonable, and the time and energy I've saved with this is well worth it.
If you have more than one computer I'd go with the Everywhere option. Go here to see How It Works. I have been very pleased with it.
After the setup time, which requires doing it on each device (including mobile devices), it's a breeze to keep updated and sync'd. It's incredibly secure (military grade AES 356 encryption) and easy to use. You can even access the stored account version from any computer by logging into your “Everywhere” account.
The desktop version is great if your only going to need passwords on one computer or want separate versions for different computers.
The “To Go” USB option is recommended for those that don't want anything left on any computer. Just don't lose the thumb drive, it's a sinking feeling. Take it from one who knows. That hour of searching was just painful, but I digress.
Go to one of these links to see the RoboForm overview and pricing
RoboForm also has Japanese, Spanish, and German language versions.
