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Offline Backup of Personal Account Vault

Alex_K
Alex_K
Community Member

Hello!
Trying out the new Personal accounts and I like what I see for the most part. Especially the easy sync between devices.

However, there is one thing, and only one thing…
I am inherently skeptical of storing data online with no personal backup and there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing that at the moment.
You could every so often copy all the data from the online vault to a local vault, but that isn't automatic.
There is expert as .1pif, however that isn't encrypted…

Why can't we have an option just like when using DropBox to sync?
Online Vault>Sync to Folder (Remember the old 1Password data files?)>Backup the file

Yeah, I like to be in control of my own data… while I don't believe you'll just up and vanish tomorrow there is something to be said for having data stored in several places not under the control of a single entity.


1Password Version: 6.3.1
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: 10.11.6
Sync Type: Not Provided

Comments

  • Hi @Alex_K,

    This is a great question!

    When you sign into your 1Password account on your device we store a locally cached copy of your data on the device. This means you do not have to have Internet access to access your data. It also means if we had an outage, or suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, you'd still have a copy of your data on your device. You could then -- as you mention -- copy everything to a local vault.

    You're right; it isn't automated. But because of the way things are currently architected (with the server being "the source of truth") it wouldn't be very practical to have local backups, at least in the traditional sense. That may be an option we can offer in the future, but the local cache (coupled with the ability to copy to a local vault) should be enough in the vast majority of scenarios.

    I hope that helps!

    Ben

  • Alex_K
    Alex_K
    Community Member
    edited September 2016

    Ok, cool!
    So as long as I have backup of the 1Password folder in ~/Library/Application Support/ I can theoretically copy that folder to a new Mac and have all my info present even without internet access/1Password Accounts disappears?

    According to the 1P whitepaper, everything gets stored on Amazon Aurora and then it gets a little fuzzy after "How are servers deployed and managed"

    Amazon Aurora I believe has 2 copies of the user data then stored over 3 regions?
    Is there another place you store users data in case Amazon has a unlikely but terrific dataloss?

    One thing I noticed yesterday is that if I for example, played with 1Password Accounts, then decided to not use it for some reason, and then try to copy all the new offline data back up a couple of months later, a whole ton of duplicates would happen.
    Duplicate entry detection would be nice, or a better way to wipe the online data and then push offline data up again.

    Thanks for your attention :)

  • @Alex_K Yep, that's correct! You will only have that version of the data though, so if you change something on another device it won't sync without internet access. ;)

    AWS in general is pretty resistant to "terrific dataloss". Their FAQ on data protection is worth a read here. We also have a redundancy on top of AWS, where we keep the database for 35 days. Document items are stored in S3 with versioning and overwrite protection.

    One thing I noticed yesterday is that if I for example, played with 1Password Accounts, then decided to not use it for some reason, and then try to copy all the new offline data back up a couple of months later, a whole ton of duplicates would happen.

    Duplicate entry detection would be nice, or a better way to wipe the online data and then push offline data up again.

    Yeah, that's why we don't recommend it lightly. It's not built for this kind of use. True offline backups may come in the future and they could handle this much better. For now, though, you can do it on your own — it's just not as smooth as we'd like.

This discussion has been closed.