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Keeping items "in sync" between 1Password.com and local vaults [not possible, except manual copy]

Sinister
Sinister
Community Member
edited March 2018 in Memberships

This tike it's not Android-specific.

You know I use both accounts and local, I've stated the reasons why. I am using the app more and more, which menas I am creating/updating login items more and more. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep my Local vaults synced (which I have to do manually) with my accounts vaults. Every few changes it is easiest to delete all items in one vault and copy all items to another vault, or to navigate to a vault, update an item, navigate to the second vault, delete an item, go to first vault, copy the item to the second vault (vault one being local or accounts and vault two being whichever the first one isn't).

Please suggest/code in a way for this to happen? An option would be allowing the sharing of actual items vs entire vaults...not sure how else?


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

Comments

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni
    edited March 2018

    @Sinister: Heya! Odds are pretty good I'll find you here in the forum, but don't ever hesitate to @-mention me (or any of us) if there's something you'd like to draw our attention to, as we'll get a notification that way. :)

    Anyway, I think this is an interesting topic, and Memberships is probably the best place for it.

    You know I use both accounts and local, I've stated the reasons why. I am using the app more and more, which menas I am creating/updating login items more and more. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep my Local vaults synced (which I have to do manually) with my accounts vaults. Every few changes it is easiest to delete all items in one vault and copy all items to another vault, or to navigate to a vault, update an item, navigate to the second vault, delete an item, go to first vault, copy the item to the second vault (vault one being local or accounts and vault two being whichever the first one isn't). Please suggest/code in a way for this to happen? An option would be allowing the sharing of actual items vs entire vaults...not sure how else?

    Hmm. I get what you're saying here, and I know a few other people do something similar...but there used to be many more, who've simply come up with a different way of doing thing since syncing between 1Password.com and local vaults just isn't possible, and maintaining data between them is always going to be a manual process. I'll explain.

    Once upon a time we created 1Password and the formats to store data. Originally, there really wasn't any notion of syncing at all, so it was just a matter of having a standard way of storing and retrieving things. Over time, WLAN Server was introduced to sync directly, and this didn't really care about file formats. But after a while, with the advent of cloud computing and better internet connections, it became feasible to sync 1Password data over the internet. So we accounted for that in later iterations of 1Password's vault formats. That sort of brings us to where "standalone" 1Password is today, with local vaults. They're designed specifically for the data structures and sync capabilities 1Password — sans .com — supports.

    And yet 1Password.com is very different. There are the obvious differences: there's no need for a "sync container" vault file format since all of that is handled by the server, and of course the encrypted data is hosted there centrally. There's also Documents, which, though they allow people to store files in 1Password as attachments do in local vaults, they're very different: completely discrete items dedicated to this purpose, which can be of virtually any size or type. They also support intra-vault links, like any other 1Password.com item. There are other (often less-visible) differences, right down to the way the data is actually stored, but suffice to say with 1Password.com we did not design for backward-compatibility, but forward-thinking for the express purpose of not only allowing us to support the features of the 1Password.com of today, but also any we add in the future.

    All of this is to illustrate that there just isn't any way to sync data between 1Password.com and local vaults today and will not be tomorrow, not because we just haven't added that feature, but because the two are so fundamentally different. They have very different uses and features, and moving data between the two, though possible with the native apps, is always going to be lossy to some extent:

    • UUID is truly a Universally Unique IDentifier, so copying an item from one vault to another — any type of vault — is going to result in two very separate items. Copying the same item again will result in a second copy in the destination, not an overwrite.
    • Copying a 1Password.com Document to a local vault is impossible. You'd need to export the file and then add it as an attachment to another item in the local vault, which will also result in a new modification date.

    Probably many others I'm not thinking of off the top of my head now, but it's also costly in terms of system resources to delete items or entire vaults and then re-copy everything over again. If you're on a desktop that may not matter to you, but a lot of people (and I'd guess most) are using 1Password on phones, tablets, and laptops, so I don't think that what you're doing is a good long-term solution. Another approach may help. For example, if you need to maintain a Dropbox vault to share for some reason, you could just keep the requisite data only there instead of trying to also maintain all of it in a separate 1Password.com vault. I have a similar setup:

    • (Primary) local vault in Dropbox
    • (Private) my 1Password.com account's main vault
    • a number of user vaults (shared and otherwise) in my own 1Password.com account
    • (Personal) my work 1Password.com account's main vault
    • a number of shared vaults in my work 1Password.com account

    It was certainly tempting to move the Dropbox vault's data to 1Password.com, but there wasn't an appropriate place there for it (yet), so I would have ended up doing what you're doing, which just wasn't tenable for me. Certainly if you want to continue doing that you can, but isn't something we've designed around because is isn't a common use case for 1Password in general, and also isn't feasible due to the differences I've outlined above (as well as others).

    I'm sorry this probably isn't the answer you were hoping for, but I'd be interested to get a better sense of your specific use case (I knew you were using both, but not the details) to see if there's anything else that might help. Let me know.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    You're gonna LOVE the answer:

    @Sinister: Oh no. I'm actually a little scared now... :dizzy:

    The main reason that I have to use both is this:
    I have one vault for me, one for my wife, and one for each of my kids. I set up and manage all of their online identities, as my wife is bad at tech and my kids are too young. My wife's and my kids' vaults are shared with me, so I can do this, and whenever any of them need one of their passwords or details, they have access to it, and so do I.
    When we travel, for instance, I navigate the different vaults for passport numbers, airline FF numbers, hotel memberships, etc.
    And here's the kicker: I do this by accessing multiple vaults (so I don't have 4 of each jumbled in one vault, one for me and one for each of then), and the ONLY way to do that on my Android phone, which DOES NOT support multiple local vaults is....you got it, 1P ACCOUNTS.
    And I prefer to continue using local for all of the reasons we have discussed at length over time and the many posts and replies. So I have to have both the local vaults and the accounts vaults all with the same info.

    Hmm. That wasn't so bad. I hate to say this though, since I feel like I should know already, but I cannot for the life of me recall the specifics of why you prefer local vaults. Would you mind summarizing for me? I went back and read some of our earlier conversations, but if it's there I'm missing it. I understand that you had local vaults already in the first place, so it would have been lower-friction for you at first to simply continue using those if you could. But what are the specific properties of local vaults that you're keeping that one around in Dropbox for? I have one I still use myself, but I'm willing to wager that your reason is better than mine. ;)

    Now, if you HAD multiple local vaults on Android...

    I know, I know. I'd like that too, but we have a lot of other features to add that are a higher priority (many of which you've mentioned yourself). :blush:

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    The main thing is the way attachments work vs documents in accounts.

    @Sinister: Ah, thank you. I do remember that now.

    Also, the ability to have a local copy in a computer or in Dropbox, for any doomsday scenario.

    Gotcha. I'm not sure I'd be willing to bank on that for a disaster myself — or that it would matter if civilization were collapsing around me — but it makes sense to plan as best you can for the worst.

    I can also share the MAIN vault, when in local, vs in accounts, for which I've had to make a SECONDARY vault be the main vault for my family (accounts does not allow the main vault to be shared), so I can do what is stated above.

    That makes a lot of sense, actually, so it's a bit surprising to me that we don't hear this from more people. But I guess most folks who just want to share their main vault with their spouse just share the account in the first place. I do get the impression though that a lot of people really are just happy to get to choose their own Master Password, rather than being stuck with one someone else setup — or trying to come up with some compromise that is still both memorable and strong.

    I also have an emergency vault that one one knows exists, and if ever needed, then it an=can be opened by whomever is meant to.

    Those are some of the things.

    And let's not dismiss that it's also just what you're used to. It's tough for me to adjust to doing things differently myself. Thanks for continuing to share different aspects of your use case, and, by extension, raise some really interesting points about decisions we've made with our design. It never hurts to take a look at things from another perspective. :)

This discussion has been closed.