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Serious question, is a password manager really better than just using a few strong passwords you remember?

I argued with a friend about this for an hour. He said his system of three complex passwords for everything was fine. I used to do that too, but last month my email got popped because I used a variant of my main password on a sketchy forum that had a breach. I switched to a password manager, Bitwarden, and now every site has a totally random 20-character password. The difference is night and day. I don't have to remember anything except the one master password, and I know that even if one site gets hacked, the rest are safe. He says it's a single point of failure, but my old method was a failure waiting to happen. What's the better move here, a manager or a personal system?
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4 Comments
the_sean
the_sean2mo ago
Oh man, my buddy had his "unique" password system fail when a recipe site got hacked. He lost his main email and his bank account got locked for a week.
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thea602
thea6027d ago
Actually "three points of failure" is a bit generous, more like each of those three passwords is a single point of failure for everything that uses it. One gets leaked and suddenly all your accounts using that same password are toast.
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lily_cooper
Seriously, password managers win every time. Your friend's system is just three points of failure instead of one. The single master password is way easier to lock down and protect.
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abbyp61
abbyp612mo ago
Wait, you used a variant on a sketchy forum?
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