Setting up 1Password.
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. In recent months, for a variety of reasons,
I've elected to change my password management solution.
I've chosen 1Password.
Now, I want to walk you through setting up a 1Password account.
But before I do, I will give you the warning that 1Password is not free.
I'll be setting up a trial of a personal account for personal use.
But eventually, if you elect to continue to use 1Password, then yes,
you'll have to sign up, enter a credit card, pay a monthly or annual fee.
In my opinion,
password management, a good password management tool is worth the money.
The security that it gives you is worth paying for.
And I'm comfortable paying for 1Password personally.
I'm using a 1Password family account because for a small increment,
I get to include my wife at less than twice the cost of a personal account.
And we get to share things very easily between the two of us.
One other caveat. I'm recommending 1Password.
But I'm not making anything from the recommendation at this point. I've chosen
it not based on their availability of an affiliate program or anything like that.
Now, that's not to say that at some point
I might not take advantage of such a thing, but I want to be clear
that the recommendation comes based on the product, not on my ability to make
any revenue from making the recommendation.
So, with that all out of the way,
let's head over here to Windows Eleven and get started.
So we're running Windows eleven.
We'll just go ahead and fire up Edge and yes, thank you,
I've been updated to the most latest version.
Wonderful.
1Password.com. The number 1 password.com is where we'll go.
We will try 1Password free.
There are two tabs here personal and Family, Team and Business.
I'm assuming that your needs are specifically personal.
As I mentioned when I started that I've
signed up for the families account, you can actually have up to five members.
But honestly, even if you have only two
members, it's cheaper than having two individual accounts.
We'll go ahead and do 1Password individual because you can always upgrade.
We'll go ahead and do 1Password
individual to walk through the steps so that you can see what this is all about.
And we'll create an account.
This account will be for Leo Ask.
Leo Note and boom.
And I want to put another quote in there.
It wasn't letting me put a double quote in there, so we'll go ahead and add
a single quote around the askolio and use my very public email address.
This obviously is optional if you want
to get information from 1Password, obviously it'll be their marketing
information, their updates, their feature updates and so forth.
I'm already getting this on my personal
account, so I'm not going to sign up for more.
It's up to you if you want to do that.
So one of the things they do obviously, is they want to make sure that you
actually own the email address that you're signing up with.
They do that, they do that verification by sending a code to that email address
to make sure you have access to it and can enter that code.
So I'm going to go ahead and find that.
So I've gotten my code.
We'll go ahead and type that in here and hit next.
Now this is the master password.
If anything, 1Password probably doesn't do a good enough job of explaining exactly
what the password is that you're setting here.
This is your master password to what will eventually become your 1Password vault.
I'm going to choose a rather long password.
This is an example account, so I expect to get rid of it.
But nonetheless, I'm going to use a long password because I should.
So just for the record, just so you know,
the password that I've entered is exceptionally long.
26 characters.
It's all lower case with some spaces.
That's one of the things length really
gets you, is you can be significantly less rigid about your character choice and your
word choice as long as you make the password extra long.
It does want a credit card, and this is part of the fact that
1password is a free trial and not a free product.
They will not charge the credit card today.
As you can see, it's going to tell me
that they're going to charge me in two weeks after my free trial is over.
Now, in my case, I'm actually going to use a Privacy.com card so that I can control
whether or not that card should even be charged later on.
So I'll take a second here and create
that card and we will go ahead and subscribe and create account.
Notice that you can create an account and add a card later.
This is up to you, especially if you're not sure if you're going to continue.
This may perhaps be the most appropriate path.
But on the other hand, if you really do believe that you're going
to end up using 1Password at some point anyway, subscribing and creating
the account is probably the right thing for you to do.
Okay, this is an incredibly important step.
I cannot understate how important this is.
You must, and I have to say must download this PDF.
We're actually going to look at the PDF here in a moment.
So I've saved what's called my one
password emergency kit that's been saved in my downloads folder as a PDF file.
And this is what you will use in two scenarios.
One is when you need to open or install
1Password with your account on another machine.
This has the information that you will need in order to do that.
The other scenario is if for whatever reason, you lose access to your account,
this is the document that will have the information you need.
I'm going to open it and show you.
Normally you should not show this document
to anyone and in fact you need to after we update it and you'll see what I mean
by that in a moment, you'll need to save it yourself in a secure location.
That can either mean printing it off or
what I prefer to do is to encrypt it and store it digitally somewhere safe.
But regardless, this is a sensitive document.
It will be the keys to your kingdom should
you ever need to get back into your 1Password account.
So you need to treat it appropriately.
I'll go ahead and double click on it.
So what you're seeing here now is the contents of this emergency kit PDF.
It has the address that you will use to sign in.
This actually turns out to be important because some types of 1Password
accounts actually use a slightly different address to sign in the email address
associated with this account, something called a secret key.
This is the magic.
And then finally your password.
Note that they give you an opportunity to write it in.
In my case, I have saved this PDF in a way that I can
actually type my password in and save the resulting PDF with everything in there.
The alternative is to print this PDF right
in your password and then save that printed PDF somewhere secure.
Totally up to you.
But these three things your email address, your secret key, and your password are
the things you need to gain access to your account.
The secret key is something that's unique to 1Password.
If you've used other password managers
in the past, it's always been a simple email address and master password.
This increases your security because
the secret key is in fact completely random and it's very large.
Now the good news is that you only need the secret key when you install one
password on another device for the first time.
It's almost like a two factor it's almost like a second factor at that point.
But the bottom line is you really only need it once.
Once you've got 1Password installed
on a machine and you've successfully signed in exactly once,
then all you will need after that is in fact your master password.
Now notice this setup code down below here.
This is a QR code that can be used in lieu
of typing in your secret key for mobile devices.
So if you install the 1Password app
on your phone, you can sign into your account by scanning this QR code.
That will actually provide both the email address and the secret key.
You will still need to type in your password.
So it's not a one shot to actually get into the account,
but it does save you from having to type in that long, horrific secret key.
The reason I saved mine in digital format is depending on your PDF viewer.
You can actually select the secret key and copy paste it to wherever you need it.
In this case, Edge is being very problematic.
Edge is a horrible PDF viewer.
I tend to use Adobe Acrobat,
but Edge is not allowing me to actually select that last character.
So I would have to type that part in manually.
But even so, it's much easier than having
to type in the entire secret key should you ever need to.
That's one argument for saving it in digital form again in some secure way.
So with that out of the way, save the emergency kit.
Here's your account.
You have two items in your personal vault already.
You have your 1Password account, which includes showing you your secret key.
And once again, you can from here copy it.
But again, if you're in a situation where
you're setting up 1Password on a new machine, of course you won't be able
to sign into 1Password to get the secret key because you'll need
the secret key in order to sign into 1Password.
But this might be another way to get it over to you.
There's your password.
You can reveal it if you like.
And basically this saves for you also
the information about your 1Password account.
The other thing it does is it sets up one
of these identity cards that can also be used to fill in things like names
and addresses and phone numbers and all that kind of stuff if you want it to.
In my case, it knows who I am, my name.
In this case, Ask Leo
Leo Notenboom.
And then with some of the details associated with this account, okay,
we have an account, but it's not quite as useful as it should be just yet.
What we really want is to install the browser extension for 1Password.
That's where a lot of the magic happens.
1Password installs as both a browser extension and a downloadable Windows
application that allows multiple different browsers to communicate with one another.
I'm just going to install the extension right now.
I'm just going to do a search, to be honest.
1Password extension downloads.
We can download it for Windows or we can download it for our Web browser.
In this case, I'm going to go ahead and say download.
This is Edge,
which ultimately is the Chrome Web store, the Microsoft Web store.
We'll get it.
We'll add the extension and we have installed the extension.
Now you can see it says Extension colon.
So we know that we're operating in this extension, installed into our browser.
We need to sign in.
We sign in now with just our password.
You can see that because we were using
this browser to set up our 1Password account, it already knows the secret key
that's supposed to be used, and now we have it in the browser.
Now there are instructions here on how
to save and fill things as you navigate the web.
If I go to, for example, AskLeo.com and sign in
using one of my many Ask Leo accounts, I've typed in my username and my password.
That's the magic to save it to one
password ask Leo, my username and the password.
You'll notice that the password here only shows like ten characters.
In reality, the password is about 20 characters long, and we'll save it.
And now, of course, I can sign in using that password.
Of course, I have that particular account
configured to use two factor authentication, and I'm signed in.
So that's how you save credentials, by hitting the Save button.
If we now sign out and I click in these fields,
you'll notice that it's offering me the option to fill in credentials for me.
And that's exactly what a password manager should do.
Now I don't have to remember the password anymore.
I need another authentication code.
Because, like I said, this account has two factor turned on.
But the bottom line here is that one password has saved my passwords for me.
Now, if I go back to the 1Password
password manager page, you'll notice that it's time to me out.
But it's kind of interesting because it's
also offering to fill in the password for me since it knows its own password.
It's kind of interesting that way.
And there is in fact, the new entry that was just created
for AskLeo.com, my account against this username and with my password.
Over time, this is how you accumulate more entries in your password database.
And over time, this is then what you would
end up using to automatically fill in as you go through.
But that's the bottom line for installing and using 1Password.
It actually isn't that horribly difficult.
It's just that it takes a few steps,
and one of them saving your emergency information.
Saving that PDF is critical to maintaining access to your account in the future.
Hope that helps.
For comments, for updates,
for related links and more, visit AskLeo.com/152844.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.