Review: Data Guardian 1.0.1
- Article 28 of 89
- MacFormat, October 2006
Store all your personal information with military-grade encryption.
We’re all liable to forget information: the time-honoured way of getting round this has been to write it down somewhere safe. In this day and age of passwords, credit card security codes and hackers, a piece of paper stuck in your wallet is just a bad idea. Something like Data Guardian is just the ticket.
For a version one product, Data Guardian is already surprisingly sophisticated and easy to use. You create a database and add records to it; by default, every new record has the fields for storing online IDs and passwords. But you can change the fields for any record to include pictures, notes, other passwords, dates, email addresses and phone numbers. You can also create categories with different defaults: any record with that category will have those fields unless you customise it. When you’re done, you can encrypt the database with the 442-bit Blowfish algorithm so no one else can access it.
Few people would want to use such a program if there weren’t an easy way of getting their existing data into it. Data Guardian can import data from text files using a particularly strong import wizard, the OS X Address Book, vCards and Contact Keeper 4. It can also import data from OS X keychains, although not the passwords, unfortunately.
On top of this relatively strong base, which lifts it above similar products such as Web Confidential, there are a few handy extras: a password generator so you can have truly random passwords, a keychain synchroniser so that you can send information back into OS X keychains and a database sync tool to share records.
Being a version one product, it does have a few flaws. The interface tends to hide things; it’s a little slow with larger databases; there are no default templates for common record-types, such as bank account details or software serial numbers; and a Palm conduit might be handy to really blast Web Confidential out of the water. However, it’s still an excellent beginning that will serve most people’s needs perfectly.