B42 - Stuck "in progress"

It may help if you delete all your keychain data from dropbox, delete the iOS app and then start the Dropbox sync process from scratch on the Mac before reinstalling 1PW on iOS.

The rest of this post is a record of what I tried to resolve the issue before doing that in case it helps the Agilebits staff work out what the problem might have been.

In my case, when I selected Dropbox sync on iOS, I was offered three different keychains. I didn't analyse why but selected the newest one. I did this a week or so ago. I then started to notice that new items weren't syncing from my Mac to the iOS devices so had a look at the Dropbox folder on my Mac. I don't know why but there were three different keychain files and two of these were nested inside the keychain package located in the root Dropbox folder.

1Password on my Mac was set up to sync with the package located in the root Dropbox folder so I deleted the others that were inside it. I then selected the same keychain on the iPad and iPhone. Both on iOS and the Mac, Dropbox then showed they were syncing continuously and this went on for over an hour.

On the Mac, pulling down the menu on the Dropbox icon in the menu bar showed the status at the bottom flickering continuously between Downloading file list ... and Updating (942 files). It suggested to me that the iOS devices and Mac were stuck in some sort of race condition. I quitted the app on both iPhone and iPad. That seemed to stop the "Downloading file list ..." status message on the Mac Dropbox menu. However the Mac still seemed stuck on "Updating (942 files)". I paused syncing on the Mac and resumed it again. This seemed to unlock things and Dropbox syncing finished quickly on the Mac.

I then launched 1PW on the iPad again. This seemed to cause the Mac to rapidly drop in and out of syncing one file. From the names on the files it seems to be duplicating every file in the .../data/default part of the keychain. I say this because the randomly generated file names are suffixed by (2).1password. It must be the iPad doing this since when the screen locks, that updating stops and starts again when 1PW is opened again on the iPad.

Then I kept 1PW open on the iPad whilst looking at the .../data/default directory on the Mac with newest items first. It seemed to be continuously going in a loop of filenames beginning with 0 to those beginning with 9. This group seemed to get smaller and smaller. Then it moved on to files in alphabetic order: files beginning with A, then B. After about 30 minutes, the Mac seemed to stop updating but the gear wheel was still spinning on the iPad app.

I then decided to delete and reinstall the app on the iPad. First thing I noticed was that when prompted for the master password after downloading the decryption keys. The entry area disappeared off the screen when the keyboard was shown (iPad in landscape orientation). It did accept the password though so this seems like a minor display bug.

The initial sync seemed to take a very long time. I didn't set off a stop watch but I'm sure it took over 30 mins. The Mac shows I have 1,269 items in All Items so I don't know if this amount of time is what I should expect or not?

Once the iPad item count grew to 1,286 items, it seemed to start the Mac dropbox sync to go crazy again i.e. Downloading file list ... flashing in the dropbox status bar. So after over an hour I gave up and decided to delete all the keychain data from Dropbox and start over. When being prompted by 1PW on Mac for the Dropbox folder to sync to, I just selected Open. This created a folder called 1Password and put the 1Password.agilekeychain package inside that. This is different from my previous setup. After waiting for the Mac to complete the dropbox update, I deleted and reinstalled the app on the iPad. The initial sync seemed to happen much more quickly with the item count increasing by 6-10 every few seconds.

Guess what, the gear icon stopped spinning and the item counts matched my Mac. I experimented with a few changes on the Mac and they seem to be syncing properly now.