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All of us want to protect ourselves. At home we have fire alarms, sprinklers and burglar alarms to keep our families safe. Car alarms and GPS for our cars keep our car and its occupants safe, and the rest of the time we are on the lookout for runaway cars, buses and those who would try to do us harm. For the same reasons we choose to protect our sensitive documents from anyone who would want to use the contents for something untoward.

By placing a password on your important files you are ensuring that your documents are safe from those who would seek to exploit it, such as identity thieves. If you own a business you will want to do the same for your financial information as well as and documents that contain info about your clients. While you may not think it is important now, if the data should ever get stolen you will be thankful for it.

The important thing is that no matter what password you choose for your files, you need to keep track of it. Nothing is more aggravating than trying to get into an important file and realizing that you forgot the password. Although writing down your passwords seem like a bad idea, if you are prone to forgetfulness it may be necessary. Above all you want to make sure that your passwords never fall into the wrong hands.

Luckily there are programs out there which are designed to help you recover your files should you forget the password. These programs, referred to as password recovery software, work in a few different ways to figure out what password you used.

Initially the program will try to open your document using a combination of letters and number to see if it can guess the right password. This may work to gain entry into your files, but if you used a long or complicated password that includes a variety of characters and symbols it may not succeed.

The second method is to go through the dictionary systematically and again try to hit on the right word. Most programs will allow you to customize your search and add numbers or symbols within the password if you know that is how you structured it. If neither method has results, then the software can try to disable the password protection on the file itself instead of trying to find the password.

While there are many software programs offered for no charge, most people will have little success in getting these programs to access their files. Investing a few dollars will get you a much more streamlined program that will give you a much better chance of accessing your file, and in less time.

Once you have recovered your files, you may want to consider an alternate method keeping track of your passwords so you dont forget them. If you have a mobile or PDA and you can password protect it, then it may be a good place to keep keys to your important files. That way your passwords are close by, but not linked to your computer.

The next time you are password protecting your documents, consider opening a secure document and saving your passwords in there, then make sure that the password you place on that document is 1) easy to remember and 2) complicated enough that a software recovery program couldn’t open it. Then you wont have to worry about lost passwords or unprotected files.