Think of Bitwarden as a vault where you keep all of your password. Let’s say you have a password for a bank, a password for your internet, etc. Your safe is protected by master password. Let’s say you want to log on to a site you would use the master password to open the vault so that you can get the password to log into the site.
In most cases, your scenario would work like this:
- You Open your browser. You use your master password to log into the bitwarden (or you can set up a pin so you don’t have to type it in).
- You go to your credit card website, which brings up the login screen.
- You click on the bitwarden icon, which will fill in your login from the vault, assuming that you have setup the entry in the vault.
If you use a phone, the principle is similar
- You open a phone, which should have bitwarden activated.
- You go to an app or website and is prompted with a logon.
- Usually, there is a drop down you can select on screen, which will fill in the user name and password, You may be prompted by a pin or biometric depending on how you setup bitwarden.
Your master password should be fairly long and hard to guess. I would use some sort of sentence that only you would know. To make things similar, I would setup pin or biometric login to avoid typing in the master password. My password is long enough that it’s annoying to type in.
Never forget your master password. Save a copy somewhere on paper or USB drive offline. If you lose your master password there is usually no recovery.