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Transfer from standalone version to membership - suggestions.

Fairgame
Fairgame
Community Member
edited March 2018 in Memberships

I have these suggestions for the transfer:

  • On the following support page:

  • Incorporate the following information from Drew_AG:

Everything is fine and now I can check for Pwned passwords, use travel mode and provide support for the best and most useful software I had ever used. Thank you.
The transfer itself was perfect, except I did not know it while I was doing it.
I had secondary “Demo” vault and I was not able to delete the Primary vault on my second Mac. The first Mac where I did the transfer, offered to delete the Primary vault and it worked. The second Mac had Primary and Demo vaults with the Primary one setup as default for saving new items. Again, I did not know this since normally I only use one vault. Had I saved an item on this Mac after the transfer, but before I figured out how to delete local Primary vault, it would have been lost because there is no sync between the standalone Primary vault and “new” Membership Private vault after the transfer is finished. I was worried that I will delete the wrong vault, this would sync and all my data would be lost. Again, everything worked great, BUT I did not understand it at the time. I turned off WiFi and shut down my first Mac so it preserves the data, I turned off WiFi on my second Mac during its transfer.
All I’m trying to say, please provide more info for different scenarios (single vault vs. multiple vaults and its relation to deleting Primary vault) with screenshots. No videos, because during the transfer it is nearly impossible to refer to a video for a specific item.

More suggestions:

  • I turned off my Dropbox sync during the transfer so my data file stayed preserved and encrypted on Dropbox. If something went wrong, I reasoned that I could always return to the standalone version, sync the file and open it with my master password. I will delete it in few days from Dropbox, but it should be safe there since it is encrypted. I only thought of this when I was transferring my iPhone and iPad with Macs finished.

  • You mention to check that everything is fine before the local Primery vault is deleted. I have no idea how to check my 300 plus items in 1PW properly.

  • It is very disconcerting to delete vault I have been using for years. Please provide more assurance that new Private vault takes over and old Primary vault will only hamper the use of 1Password software and should be deleted. Provide pictorial description of these vault and their location and sync. I probably confused Private and Primary vault somewhere in this writeup, but the intent should be clear from the context :)
  • After deleting old Primary vault with all data, new Primary vault that is strictly local, could be created if the user desires to do so to keep certain items there.
  • And as some other posts indicate, I also had “duplicate” entries in my new account. This could be explained better in the steps. I had only one vault so this multiple vault and selection of which one to view, which one is default for saving new items was new to me, never seen before. By poking around after seeing all my duplicate entries, it helped me to decipher the process as I described it above. But I was worried that I will have to go and delete manually each of my duplicated items.

So you may consider to add additional and optional steps at the appropriate part of the transfer process:
- Turn off current sync such as Dropbox
- Designate new Private vault as default on each device
- Use Membership account for a little while (from few minutes to few days, user to decide) until comfortable that everything is working fine
- Delete local vault(s)

Thank you for great password manager.


1Password Version: 7.0.6
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: iOS 11.2.6
Sync Type: Membership account

Comments

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @Fairgame: Thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry to hear you ran into some trouble there, but I'm glad you were able to get it sorted out. Everything is working as designed though. Let me explain. We intentionally haven't mentioned things like that in our documentation because, as Drew alluded in his post with regard to splitting that person's comments off into a separate discussion, this is very situational. Having instructions like that there, which don't apply to most people, would confuse many, and honestly if and when someone runs into trouble, contacting us (like you did here, though you'd already found the solution yourself) is the best thing to do so we can give specific instructions for each individual situation. As ex example, most often when I help someone with a similar issue, it applies to only one or some of their devices, so even when someone effectively has the same situation, those instructions won't apply to them completely, and more or fewer steps, often on different platforms, will be needed. And, for a lot of folks, it isn't even clear to them what their situation is in the first place, so following instructions that apply to someone else's situation can make things worse for them. I think the fact that you had created a Demo vault which you'd forgotten about illustrates that. Nothing against you at all, since, as I'm sure you can imagine, most people are even less likely than you are to keep track of these things. :)

    All that said, I agree with you completely that none of this is ideal. We just need to be careful to make the guides cover the most common situations without causing unnecessary confusion or getting people in trouble. You raise some excellent, specific points, but what you may not realize is that we go to a lot of trouble to have the apps fill in the gaps for the documentation and vice versa wherever possible. For example, while we do recommend you "check things out" after transferring your data, this is mostly for your peace of mind (as the 1Password desktop apps automatically backup your data before removing the Primary vault), as well as ensuring you don't migrate personal data to a work account if you didn't want to do that. And, for instance, we don't want to fully automate things that some people won't want to happen — like getting rid of local vaults. We also agree wholeheartedly that we need to do better with multiple vault migration, which 1Password doesn't do at all right now out of caution. The Personal/Private vault is the only one which can never be shared or accessed by an admin in a team or family, so we don't want 1Password dumping a bunch of data you'd never want someone else to be able to access into sharable vaults in an account. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we're looking into ways we can make all of this easier without making it easy for users to shoot themselves in the foot. And, perhaps most importantly either way, we're always here to help anyone who needs it. Thanks for the kind words and your support. We'll continue to strive to earn both. :)

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