Cleaning Out Those Old Digital Wallet Cards

[Jason Dunn]

If you're like me, you use some sort of digital wallet software on your Pocket PC. Myself, I use <a href="http://www.twopeaks.com/site/specials/ppct2.aspx">FlexWallet</a> from Two Peaks. With FlexWallet at least, performance slows down once you get past 75 cards or so, because after you enter the password is has to decrypt every card in the wallet. I imagine most other digital wallet tools are the same, although I can't be sure. I had over 160 cards in my FlexWallet file, and when I started looking through them all, I realized that many of them were information I no longer needed, especially in my Passwords directory where I kept username/password information. I had dozens of accounts that I hadn't used in over a year, and various other cards containing useless bits of data. Once I cleaned them out, it made a small speed boost, but more than that it reduced the clutter and made it easier to find the cards that I accessed frequently.<br /><br />So if you're looking for a speedier, more streamlined digital wallet experience, and a wallet that takes up less space on your Pocket PC, spend a few minutes and clean out those cards you're no longer user. Remember though, when in doubt, you'd better keep the data! ;-)

[Jacob]

I don't know if you can do this with FlexWallet, but with eWallet you can cut/copy cards from one wallet to another.

This would allow you to create a "Old Data" wallet so you don't lose the data you think you won't need anymore and speed/clean up your current wallet.

[alizhan]

Indeed. Moving old cards to another wallet is one of the few reasons I have found for having multiple wallets in the first place. Otherwise, I find them to be unnecessary flexibility (to wit, imagine if Calendar or Contacts required you to load the right file before you could see your data 8O).

Still, manually copying is cumbersome and error-prone. I change my passwords on a fairly regular basis (at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it :wink:). I would like to keep a record of what the old passwords were, in case they are ever needed again--say, for an older encrypted file which got missed when moving to the new password. Using the cut/paste approach works, but requires too much user discipline.

What I would like to see is an "archive" function in these programs; some sort of version tracking. Want to change the password? Change it; the program automatically archives the old one. No longer use an account? Delete it; the program automatically archives it. The archive maintains a full history of the card, so old states can be recovered. This even addresses the speed issue of the original post, as the program would have to read only the "active" cards.

So far, I haven't seen anything like this feature in the wallets I've tried. Has anyone else?

[T-Will]

I use Flexwallet...just a quick question...how do you guys have your wallets organized? Mine's organized like this:

Alta
Banking and Financial
Church
Computer & Network Info
Personal
School
Web Sites

[Jason Dunn]

I use Flexwallet...just a quick question...how do you guys have your wallets organized?

Mine looks like this:

Affiliate Accounts
Banking
CHCC (Church)
Client/Family Passwords
Credit Cards
Health Care
Internet Access
Misc.
Other Cards
Passwords
Phone
Vehicles
Web Sites

[Jacob]

Mine looks like:

Bank Accounts
Credit Cards
Email
Forums
Hardware
Internet
Old Software (this needs to be exported soon )
Personal Information
Software Info
Work.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Mine looks like:

Bank Accounts
Credit Cards
Email
Forums
Hardware
Internet
Old Software (this needs to be exported soon )
Personal Information
Software Info
Work.
That looks identical to the way I arrange my information with one difference. Because of the speed slowdowns with FlexWallet, I put a lot of that same information into ListPro (Hardware, Software, Forums, etc.). All the information that needs to stay secure remains in FlexWallet (Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, Internet shopping sites, etc.).

[baker]

Bills
Work
Family
Finance
Home Computers
Insurance
News
On-Line Shopping
Personal
PPC
Schools (kids info)

[ctmagnus]

Slightly OT: Do any other FlexWallet users have the problem of most of a screenful of missing icons, towards the bottom of the icon selector, on the Pocket PC?

[baker]

The problem you mention ctmagnus comes and goes for me. I'm up to 75 cards and things load fairly quickly. If I add a few cards back to back or change icons on a few, I think it gets mixed up.

[Kati Compton]

You know, for cases where you may have a few cards that are related with only a little bit of info each, you may want to see if you could create some sort of "meta card" to put all that data in. So, instead of having 3 different frequent flier number cards, have one card to store all the numbers.

This will only make a difference if there's some sort of "per card" extra processing time. Otherwise, it's a similar amount of data.

Just a thought.

Actually, I may do that just for readability...

[ctmagnus]

The problem you mention ctmagnus comes and goes for me. I'm up to 75 cards and things load fairly quickly. If I add a few cards back to back or change icons on a few, I think it gets mixed up.

I have 120 cards. That must cause it.

[tato68]

guys,

i use ewallet (3.10) with hundreds of cards and speed degredation. maybe you guys should check it out.

[iant54]

I'm using CodeWalletPro, and my latest listing is:

Accounts
Business (unused original category)
Calling cards
E-mail
Friends (web)
General
Identification
Internet (web)
ISPs
Loyalty Cards
Memberships
My charge cards
PC Hardware
PC Software
PC Web (web)
PDA Hardware
PDA Software
PDA Web (web)
Personal Files
Work

The "web" folders are so that I've got the URLs and any relevant info.

[Wiggin]

I use CodeWallet Pro, with loads of cards (225+), and the software has never changed in performance over the years. (It has improved when I've upgraded to faster PPCs though :mrgreen: )
My CodeWallet data file is 250KB. I'm curious, how large is your Flexwallet file JD?

I have the following catagories:
Auto Info
Banking Info
Computer/PDA Info
Credit Card Accounts
General Electronics Info
Email/ISP Accounts
Frequent Flier Accounts
Hotel Accounts
Personal ID Information
Insurance
Medical Info
Rental Car Accounts
Software Registration Numbers
Telephone Accounts & Calling Card Accounts
WWW Accounts (site URLs, IDs, passwords, key acct info, etc.)
:way to go:

[jwf]

I tend to use ListPro for non-secure stuff, but the only thing that irritates me is that you can't search across ListPro lists. FlexWallet lets you search across all categories.

You can switch off encryption of certain categories in FlexWallet - does that improve startup time I wonder - I have mine completely locked at the top level.

[ctmagnus]

You can switch off encryption of certain categories in FlexWallet - does that improve startup time I wonder - I have mine completely locked at the top level.

In my experience, the difference is negligible.