W-Shadow.com

Opera has a handy password manager feature – the “Wand”. The only problem with Opera Wand is that it doesn’t have any way to view or export the saved passwords. Luckily there are some tricks and third-party tools that can do it for you. Since I recently spent several hours researching various solutions I figured I’d compile a short list of my discoveries here for the benefit of other Opera users who may encounter a similar problem. Enjoy 🙂

UnWand

UnWand is a very simple and free command-line utility that extracts passwords from a Opera Wand datafile. To find the wand.dat file enter opera:about in the address bar and locate the line “Opera directory” in the “Paths” section. wand.dat will be in that folder. Copy that file to the same directory as unwand.exe and run retrieve.bat.

This may not work for everyone. In my case the program only displayed a handful of cached passwords (out of hundreds actually stored), so it might not be fully compatible with Opera 9.51. The source code is available but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptography to attempt to debug it. Also, if you have set a master password, unwand.exe won’t be able to decode it.

JavaScript/HTML hacks

There are various tricks that can recover the login data from the password entry form, not Wand itself. There’s a Opera “Power Button” that can retrieve Wand passwords using a bit of JS. I also found another related password recovery technique which involves editing the HTML source of the password form in question.

These two methods will only work if you can still access the original login page. They will also be useless if the site in question has been completely redesigned (as Opera probably won’t be able to recognize the new login form) or if it uses HTTP authentication.

Shareware Tools

Since neither of the aforementioned free methods were 100% effective for me I finally turned to commercial software for help. There are two applications that can recover Wand passwords :

• Opera Password Recovery threw a few error messages but managed to read and display all of my Wand passwords correctly. The demo version only shows the first 3 characters from the passwords, but I’m sure you can find a solution for that. And by that I mean “buy it for $27”, naturally.
• The second candidate, Opera Password Recovery Master, crashed on the first run. When I tried it again it started up fine but failed to recover any passwords. Too bad.