Google Authenticator for Windows (Discontinued Support)

Google Authenticator for Windows has been discontinued and support for the program has been pulled.  I suggest everyone to go download the free and open source authenticator software called WinAuth.

My suggestion is to backup your authenticator data using the following instructions.

1. Go to the Security Configuration tab.
2. Check the “Allow Unencrypted Backups” checkbox.
3. Press the “Save Configuration” button.
4. Go to the Backup/Restore tab.
5. Check the “Unencrypted backup” checkbox.
6. Click the “Backup Accounts” button.
7. Open the folder you saved the file to in Windows Explorer.
8. Double-click on the file and you should get a message stating that Windows doesn’t know how to open the file in question.  Check the “Select a program for a list of installed programs” and then click OK.
9. Find Notepad in the list, uncheck “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” and then click OK.
10. Verify that the data is similar to this…

// Unencrypted
// Backup File Version 2
AccountName|AccountKey
// Checksum: (random numbers and letters)

11. If it does, you have a proper backup to work with in WinAuth.
12. Open WinAuth and use the information in the file to recreate your accounts in WinAuth.
13. Once you know that your accounts are imported properly into WinAuth, go back to Google Authenticator for Windows and go to the About tab.  Click on the “Erase ALL Data!” button and then delete the program’s EXE file.
14. Don’t forget to delete the goobackup file you created in step 6.

Or, you can do the following process.
1. Go to the Security Configuration tab.
2. Uncheck “Require Password To Reveal Secret Key”. Respond with a “Yes” to the prompt.
3. Click the “Save Configuration” button.
4. The program will ask for your program password.
5. Go to the Manage Accounts tab.
6. Select an account in the list of accounts.
7. Press the “Reveal Secret Key” button.
8. A textbox will appear below the three buttons. Inside that textbox that appeared is your account’s secret key. Copy it to the Windows clipboard by selecting the text and either press Control-C on the keyboard or right-click on it and choose Copy. Be quick about this, the secret key textbox disappears after 30 seconds.
9. Once you have all of your accounts imported into WinAuth, go back to Google Authenticator for Windows and go to the About tab.  Click on the “Erase ALL Data!” button and then delete the program’s EXE file.

Why have I done this?  Simple, I don’t have the time to keep Google Authenticator open as an active development project so I hand the reigns over to WinAuth.  Those guys really know what they are doing over there and they’re doing some really great work.  Plus, WinAuth does a lot more than just Google Authenticator code, it does Battle.NET codes as well.

So head on over to WinAuth and download WinAuth today.

Last updated on Monday, January 14th, 2013 at 1:08 PM by trparky.