Passwords for Email and Internet Backups

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Passwords for Email and Internet Backups

When you are making Email backups, you are prompted for a password. For better security, if you use too weak a password, you will be recommended to use a stronger one, based on the following rules.

 

Likewise, when you are setting up, making or restoring Internet backups, you will be required to use a strong password based on the following rules.

 

These are the rules for a strong password:

 

It must be at least 8 characters long.

It must include characters from at least 3 of the four groups: capital letters, small letters, numbers, and symbols (everything else). Note: This implies that passwords are case-sensitive, i.e. it matters whether each letter you use is entered as a capital or small letter.

It cannot include any initial 4-letter sequence from any word in your Organization Name from the Maintenance Organization Info window. (This check ignores the case of letters, for example if your Organization Name includes the word "Church", your password cannot contain "chur", "CHUR" etc.)

It cannot include any initial 4-character sequence from a set of too-commonly used passwords, like "password", "qwerty", "1234" etc. Again, this check ignores the case of letters.

It cannot start the same as your Unique ID for Internet Backups, which is not a password.

 

If any of these rules are violated by the password that you enter, you will be told exactly what the rule is that you violated, and given an option to re-enter the password. If you do not accept that option in the case of Email backups, your too-weak password will just be used. If you do not accept that option to re-enter the password in anything related to Internet backups, the action you were trying will be canceled,

 

Note: When you are prompted for a password for restoring an email backup, these checks are not done. That is because strong passwords are not mandatory for making email backups, so there is no point in trying to encourage you to use a strong password to restore an email backup, which may not have been made with a strong password in the first place!

 

Software4Nonprofits cannot reset Email backup or Internet backup passwords for you, or give you any way to access either of those types of backups if you forget your password. However, for the Internet backups, you can go back to the configuration in the Backup/Restore Backup Frequency and Options window, and click Setup Storage again to provide a new password, if you have forgotten the old one. That will allow you to resume making new Internet backups, but it will not allow you to restore any previous Internet backups made with the password that you forgot.

 

Note: If you set up multiple databases for multiple organizations, any passwords that you set up are specific to each database.


This topic was last edited on Sep 9, 2022