Inspiration

A friend's blog had a entry last week asking for ideas on:

I want to store contact information (email addresses and cell phone numbers) somewhere that is (1) secure (2) immune from losing the information (3) free. What are your suggestions?

He had lost his cell phone a while back and with it all his names and numbers.

I commented and mentioned my beloved Cardfile program but as I wrote the comment, thought of using KeePass.

I started it up and looked around. I realized that I could create a folder in KeePass (I called it "Names and Addresses"). I put the name in KeePass' "Title" field and the body of the entry in the "Notes" field. This gave me a view very much like Cardfile.
The entries look like this:
I went through pure Hell converting my Cardfile entries to CSV format to import but they eventually came in cleanly. Look at the screen shot above - I made the e-mail addresses mailtos and they even come through as hyperlinks.

Now all my names and addresses are strongly encrypted on my USB key and backed up to the hard drive each time they're changed (keeping 3 old copies). KeePass runs from the USB key without installation on any version of Windows.