Trouble with Dropbox Sync + Backup
HI all,
A few months back, I spent a considerable amount of time pruning old/duplicate password entries, and managed to trim things down from 600+ to 420 total entries. Not bad!
I sync my database with Dropbox across multiple Macs and 2 iOS devices. Here's where the trouble starts:
I used a Mac that hadn't been on in a while earlier today, and it synced my Dropbox data. Good, right?
Unfortunately, this also added all those old passwords I had deleted to my Dropbox copy, so I'm back at 600. No problem - I'll restore from a backup, right? ;-)
When I restored from a backup that had the proper (lesser) number of entries, Dropbox syncing was disabled. No problem - I'll just re-enable Dropbox sync, right? ;-)
Re-enabling Dropbox sync re-merged all those deleted entries into my restored backup!
So my question: how can I restore from my backup and get that copy reflected in Dropbox's version? Essentially, I want to replace the Dropbox version wholesale with my local backup.
Is this possible??
Comments
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Hi @hoserama99,
Doug McKenzie: Ahhh! Take off, you hoser.
and now that I have that out of my system back to your quandary.
The backup that you restored, does it represent an accurate snapshot of your vault as you want it? If it does then the following should work for you. If you have any items that are only on other device then don't follow these steps and instead let us know . I also assume that you're working with a single primary vault. If this assumption isn't correct too please do let us know what vaults you have and where and we can adjust the steps.
- On the Mac with the good backup restore the backup once more. Again, this will disable sync which I'll explain about later.
- Delete the defective .agilekeychain from Dropbox.
- Re-enable Dropbox sync and 1Password should offer to create a new .agilekeychain instead of merge.
- On your other Mac, the one that is responsible for the blip, I would suggest following our How do I start over with an empty vault? guide. It will pick up the new .agilekeychain in Dropbox instead of believing it should add a couple of hundred deleted items back to the .agilekeychain.
- Your iOS devices will at the very least report that sync is disabled because they notice the .agilekeychain is a different one. You have two options here. If you're worried they're going to do something similar you could follow the starting over guide again but for iOS or you can simply re-enable sync and see if they decide to behave better than the Mac. It depends on whether all of the deletions had already been synchronised to the iOS devices before the other Mac decided to cause havoc.
If you cleared the Trash of all of these old items, so there is no evidence at all that they existed, then you may need to start over again on the iOS devices. When sync is enabled we know we need to have a way of recording when items have been deleted and we call these tombstone items. In an .agilekeychain they are zero byte files which simply say, this UUID once existed but now it's gone. My understanding is though we won't create these in a new .agilekeychain if they were deleted before we create the .agilekeychain (I'll enquire for confirmation). So when the iOS device merges with the .agilekeychain it will see a UUID for an item you actually deleted but with no tombstone it will mistakenly believe it's a new item and push it to the .agilekeychain. That we don't want. If the deletions had already synchronised then you should be fine.
Going back to the topic of backups. The reason we disable sync when you restore a backup is exactly for these sorts of situations. If the reason behind needing to restore a backup was an out of control sync situation then what you don't want it to repeat after the restore finishes. To give you a fighting chance to rectify this we disable sync so as to not cause an endless cycle. Thankfully you can restore the backup again and then the steps above should sort you out.
If you have any questions at all please do ask :smile: otherwise hopefully we'll be hearing about your success.
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Yes, the local backup I have represents the One True Vault. I just need to force this on Dropbox so it gets re-synced. I'll give that a shot. I fell into this hole because I turned on a Mac I hadn't used in a while before sending it in for repair, so it'll be a week or so before I can test for success.
One last question: this data is synced across many Macs (I count at least 4). Will I have to repeat this process on those Macs as well or will it be sufficient to just fix the Dropbox data once?
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Hi @hoserama99,
Once you get your repaired Mac back, you'll be able to follow our starting over steps on that Mac (as mentioned in step #4 from littlebobbytables) and that should take care of the problem. If you run into any problems with that, please let us know!
One last question: this data is synced across many Macs (I count at least 4). Will I have to repeat this process on those Macs as well or will it be sufficient to just fix the Dropbox data once?
If those other Macs had been syncing until recently, it should be fine to simply re-enable Dropbox sync. When you do that, you'll choose the new copy of .agilekeychain in Dropbox and then "merge" the data. Those Macs should end up with the same data as the "One True Vault". I don't think you'll have any trouble with that, but if something goes wrong, you can always restore from the "good" backup.
Please let us know how it all goes, thanks! :)
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