How I migrated from a single account to a Family Account

Hey @architect1337! Thanks for posting this. We love feedback and stories about how people do things. It helps us make 1Password better. :) I've got some comments on your story, and I'll quote the things you said and answer them below.

First, you need the correct tools. My keychains were stored on Dropbox. So as for tools, the only version of 1Password that I found can do the conversion is 1Password for Mac. The Windows 10 beta and iOS version can't do the conversion yet. Windows 4 desktop version doesn't work with families so don't bother trying.

1Password for Windows (10) actually does have support for moving Dropbox data over. I wrote a quick post about this in another thread. All you have to do is sign in to your Dropbox account and set up the vault in the app, then select the items and move them over. A bit different than 1Password for Mac, but not too much so.

Next, go to your Mac desktop version of 1Password and add your family account. Strangely (with version 6.2.1 from the Apple Store), you do this by going into the 'Preferences' then 'Teams' and click the 'plus' button. Enter all the information and your Family accounts will be imported. You can now switch between vaults as usual (click the '1password logo in the top left of the app'.

I agree! This is really strange, which is why we fixed it in a beta a little while back. That's not out in the regular app yet, though. Sorry for the confusion. We should have it all cleared up next week. :)

Go to your personal vault, select all the items you want to migrate, and either via 'right click' or 'Item', click Share and choose the Families vault you want to copy them to. I would copy them for now, then when happy, eventually delete your old personal info.

Which way did you do it? I'm curious whether you right-clicked or used the Share menu. Also, it's good to note that when you move items, they go to the Trash of the old vault so you can restore them if you need to.

You can then do the same with any other user (i.e. your partner) but only via the Mac client. If they have a separate Mac, then great - repeat the instructions above. If they don't, then they could give you a copy of their keychain (.agilekey or .opvault) file and you could do the import for them. You'd have to open their keychain file as a personal vault, then login with their master password, then do the share technique as mentioned above.

Indeed. Everyone does this a bit differently it seems. I've not known anyone who's given their vault file to their partner to move for them. Great idea!

Finally, Families is only currently going to work for browser logins on a Mac / iOS / Android. This is because Windows v4 doesn't support families and 1Password beta doesn't support browser plugins. My view is that this makes the Windows version impractical at this point, until browser plugins / extensions are supported.

Actually, do you have Windows 10? If you do, install the Windows 10 app, sign in to your account, select a Login, and click the Browser button in the bottom right. Behold! Open and Fill on Windows. :+1: We're hoping to have this and more on Windows 7 and 8 soon.

Again, thanks so much for letting us know about your experience. It's been enlightening.

@architect1337: The terminology can definitely be confusing. before 1Password Teams/Families, it seemed less confusing, but I suspect that's only because we were all just used to talking about it. ;)

I think the term "keychain" here may be a big part of the problem. We've moved away from that over the years because it more generally refers to the OS X (or iOS) system Keychain. 1Password actually used to use that to store data in the beginning. Then with 1Password 2/3 we introduced our own AgileKeychain format, but this is really just a name for one type of vault. Finally, 1Password now also supports the newer OPVault format. Helpfully, it has "vault" right in the name, because that's the function it serves. 1Password Teams/Families doesn't have a file format in the traditional sense because the database is optimized for the server environment; the apps simply keep a local cache of the data. And ultimately it's all about vaults which contain items. All of the above conform to this, so discussing things in terms of vaults seems less confusing.

Regarding backups, the server automates this and keeps a history of changes going back a full year, so you can restore right from the web interface. Local backups are something we're considering, but they're not currently supported. You can, however, backup the entire local database cache in ~/Application Support/1Password 4/.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions! :)