One of the drawbacks of getting all techno and assigning encrypted passwords to your files is that you have to remember those passwords if you ever want to reverse the encryption in the future. Since my memory sucks and writing down the passwords kind of defeats the whole purpose of encryption in the first place, I often find myself up the creek without the paddle.

I unearthed an old work-related Adobe PDF file today which I had originally sent to someone else and before sending it, I disabled features such as "extract pages" and I slapped a password on it so the other person couldn't reverse the disabled features. But 9 months on, my Swiss cheese brain has totally forgotten the password I used and so I had to go searching online for a PDF password cracker.

The best one seems to be Crack PDF which is free to try out but it's $25 for the full version. I installed the trial version and stunningly, the password was cracked and erased in seconds! So the program certainly seems to know how to do its job!

The only drawback is that it doesn't reveal what the password was. It just disables the password and erases it. But that's fine.

If you're looking for a PDF password cracker, Crack PDF is definately worth a look.