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Link to original post: [drupal=2482]I can be really stupid sometimes[/drupal]
Well, that's a lie, I pretty much AM stupid a LOT of the time.
But in this particular situation, I'm really angry at myself...
So I've had a Word Document for a while now (uh...jeez, 7 years now?) with personal information in it. Well, okay, it's essentially the equivalent of a "diary" of sorts (yeah, sue me, it helps to be able to rant sometimes and it's always entertaining to reread that kind of stuff).
I had the file buried in a random directory for quite a while and didn't password protect it because I figured it was safe enough buried and named oddly. It turns out that, at some point very recently, after 6-7 years of having the file, I decided I should password protect the file in order to make sure that even if someone found it, they couldn't get to the actual content.
But of course, I decided I had to be clever and use some odd password. I know this, because after trying to open it last night, I realized that of 5 or so passwords that I've used fairly regularly, none of them worked, nor did slight variations on them.
I do have the file on each of my computers -- my new laptop (and current computer), my desktop, and my old laptop. I checked my desktop and it's password-protected on there. I'm nearly positive it wouldn't be on my old laptop...unfortunately, though, that's moot, because apparently my power cord for my old laptop is non-functional now, and there's a reason I got a new laptop...my old one had NO battery charge, at all, whatsoever, and was incapable of ever retaining one ever again.
From Googling, I've found that there are a metric ton of password-cracking tools. However, half of them require you to pay, and the other half are crappy demos that limit the number of characters in a password it will crack, to the point where I can tell it won't actually find my password (I would've made it longer than 3 characters). There are also a few methods for fixing passwords without even using a program, but they're either for Word 2003 or they're for 2007 and just don't work. Of course, my two accessible computers both have 2007...and nowadays it's impossible to find even a free trial of 2003, because everything is 2007 now.
I realize that using the same password for everything is highly insecure, but this was even just to protect the file from random people. It having the same password as something else of mine would only be an issue if random people would actually care to hack some random Word Document of mine and already hacked other things. And for crying out loud, there's no use in protecting a file so much that even YOU can't access it.
So I'm really stupid for not doing a good job protecting this file at all. I'm just hoping I'll resolve it in some way, shape, or form, because I'll be really upset if I lose this file.
I just needed to get this off my chest...it's fairly late, so I hope this wasn't completely boring and discombobulated.
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Well, that's a lie, I pretty much AM stupid a LOT of the time.
But in this particular situation, I'm really angry at myself...
So I've had a Word Document for a while now (uh...jeez, 7 years now?) with personal information in it. Well, okay, it's essentially the equivalent of a "diary" of sorts (yeah, sue me, it helps to be able to rant sometimes and it's always entertaining to reread that kind of stuff).
I had the file buried in a random directory for quite a while and didn't password protect it because I figured it was safe enough buried and named oddly. It turns out that, at some point very recently, after 6-7 years of having the file, I decided I should password protect the file in order to make sure that even if someone found it, they couldn't get to the actual content.
But of course, I decided I had to be clever and use some odd password. I know this, because after trying to open it last night, I realized that of 5 or so passwords that I've used fairly regularly, none of them worked, nor did slight variations on them.
I do have the file on each of my computers -- my new laptop (and current computer), my desktop, and my old laptop. I checked my desktop and it's password-protected on there. I'm nearly positive it wouldn't be on my old laptop...unfortunately, though, that's moot, because apparently my power cord for my old laptop is non-functional now, and there's a reason I got a new laptop...my old one had NO battery charge, at all, whatsoever, and was incapable of ever retaining one ever again.
From Googling, I've found that there are a metric ton of password-cracking tools. However, half of them require you to pay, and the other half are crappy demos that limit the number of characters in a password it will crack, to the point where I can tell it won't actually find my password (I would've made it longer than 3 characters). There are also a few methods for fixing passwords without even using a program, but they're either for Word 2003 or they're for 2007 and just don't work. Of course, my two accessible computers both have 2007...and nowadays it's impossible to find even a free trial of 2003, because everything is 2007 now.
I realize that using the same password for everything is highly insecure, but this was even just to protect the file from random people. It having the same password as something else of mine would only be an issue if random people would actually care to hack some random Word Document of mine and already hacked other things. And for crying out loud, there's no use in protecting a file so much that even YOU can't access it.
So I'm really stupid for not doing a good job protecting this file at all. I'm just hoping I'll resolve it in some way, shape, or form, because I'll be really upset if I lose this file.
I just needed to get this off my chest...it's fairly late, so I hope this wasn't completely boring and discombobulated.
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, this really sucks...