1Password on my iPhone no longer recognizes what I know is the valid password, and will not open.

Hi @estivi

Do you have 1Password on your iPhone set up to sync your 1Password data, or are you using a 1Password membership? If you have not been using a membership have you been backing up your data? Are you able to access your 1Password data on any other devices?

Please let us know.

Ben

Hi @estivi,

No worries, and thanks for the update... but could you please answer each of the questions I asked above? Direct answers to each of those questions will help me point you in the right direction for your situation.

Thank you.

Ben

@estivi: Are you able to access your 1Password data on your computer then? If you've gotten things out of sync, perhaps the best approach is to sync all of the data over from the computer from scratch. Let me know if that works for you. I'll still need to know the sync method you were using though.

@estivi: Where do you have all of your 1Password data currently accessible?

@estivi: No worries! Thanks for getting back to me. I understand from your earlier comments that you have saved a backup of your 1Password data on your computer, but what I'd like to know is if you have your 1Password data accessible to you there — e.g. are you able to open 1Password for Windows and view your passwords, etc? Also, have you been syncing your 1Password data between devices using Dropbox, or another method? I'm trying to get a sense for what options there might be to recover your data if it's damaged on your iPhone. Thanks in advance!

I can open 1Password for Windows and find recent backups, but they all seem to have data from three years ago.

@estivi: The 1Password desktop apps save backups of the data stored there. So if you have data there from three years ago, that will also be the age of the backups. A new backup would only be saved if you'd made a change in 1Password for Windows.

I was not doing more regular backups because I thought a backup was being done every time I synced my iPhone.

How have you been syncing?

I guess that's incorrect. So I see backups, but like I say, and can see what they contain, but the data inside is mostly stale. To be honest, I find the difference between accessing a backup and accessing data to be confusing.

Backups are zipped archives. When I say "accessing the data in 1Password", I mean literally opening the 1Password app and entering your Master Password to unlock it. When you're referring to backups, what exactly do you have? What are the filenames?

I'm not sure this is really giving you the answer to your question. Please let me know. One possibility that occurred to me would be to delete the 1Password app on my phone and restore the data from a backup on my desktop. Would that work? Thanks for your help.

That's what I'd like to have you do, but I'd like to establish where you have a current copy of your data. If that's only on your phone, deleting the app would wipe that out. And I'm not sure that's a great option. Hopefully it's not the only one.

I fortunately, based on years of computer experience, don't rely on a single storage place for important data. I have most of the same information stored in a different place. I could reenter much of it by hand if necessary, and could start by restoring from the desktop backup.

@estivi: That sounds like good news, but I'd hate for you to have to re-enter everything manually. Can you tell me where you have the data and what format it's in?

By the way, any idea how this happened? One day the master password just stopped working.

Having no information about what's transpired on your device I can't say for certain, except to say that from experience and based on the way that 1Password works the possible causes are entering the password incorrectly (wrong vault, wrong input method, etc.) or data corruption. 1Password doesn't know or care what the Master Password is; it's merely using it as an input to encrypt the data in the first place, and again as an input to decrypt it. I know that's not very helpful, but that's the only answer I have for you. :blush:

@estivi: No need to apologize. You did the right thing by getting in touch! I apologize for misunderstanding though. I was under the impression that you had a copy or backup saved from 1Password. If they're only in a Word document, you would need to enter them manually into 1Password, but 50 does seem fairly manageable. I'm sorry for the trouble you've had, and in the future if you backup your data it will be easier to recover if something gets damaged.

@estivi: Great! What format is the backup in? And what version of 1Password are you using on the PC?

@estivi: Fantastic! Rename that from .agilekeychain_zip to .zip, and then you can extract an actual AgileKeychain vault from it. This can be opened directly in 1Password for Windows version 4 (from the File menu), and sync'd via Dropbox to be used by 1Password for iOS as well. Let me know how it goes! :)

@alkhaja: Thanks so much for the update! I'm glad to hear that you were about to remember it. It sounds like you should be all set, but we're here if you have any other questions. :)