Autosave when editing an entry?

cwisniewski

Agile team:

I'm not certain in which category to place this question/request, so I hope 'Agile Lounge' is not too far afield. Yesterday was not the first time that I seem to have lost critical information stored in a 1Password record. I edited the record from within the OS X version that is running my main computer. Later in the day, from a remote location, while viewing the record on my laptop, the entry lacked all of the new information I had added earlier. The same was true when I viewed the entry from my iPhone. Clearly, the information had not properly been saved from the editing session performed earlier on the main computer. And, indeed, once I returned home, the entry was just as void of the new information when being viewed from the 1Password application running on the main computer. My data is stored in DropBox.

It's, of course, impossible to say precisely, but I suspect that perhaps I failed to click the 'Save' button within 1Password's interface after making my changes. It seems unlikely that such a thing would happen, but it's the only explanation I can come up with shy of DropBox failing and 1Password not issuing an error to let me know.

Is it true that 1Password has no autosaving functionality built-in for the scenario I am describing here? And, if not, is that a feature that could be added without an enormous amount of work in a not-too-distant release? Imagine one's word processor not having an autosave feature---that would be pretty terrible. I suspect most of your customers, when adding or changing information in 1Passsword, would argue that the data there is even more important not to lose than is a page or three of data in a document.

khad

Thanks for taking the time to contact us about this, cwisniewski. I'm really sorry to hear that you had this issue. From your description, I believe your guess regarding the cause of the matter is likely spot on.

Is it true that 1Password has no autosaving functionality built-in for the scenario I am describing here?

That is correct. We want to make sure that there is still a way to back out of any changes made without saving them if you wish to do so, but that is likely mitigated by the undo function.

I'll pass your vote for this along to the developers. We take data integrity very seriously, and I believe autosave could be a helpful aspect of it. For now, please do be sure to click the "Save" button, and let me know if you have any other trouble.

cwisniewski

Khad,

Thanks very much for your reply. is it possible that one would get into the same sort of trouble as I described in my prior post if I had simply left 1Password running on one machine, and then merely opened 1Password (using same DropBox location for base file) from a different machine? Or, worse, viewed and/or edited the same record as was open on the other machine? This happens all too often with me, I'm afraid to say, but it is a habit I certainly stop. But if this is a problem, what about all of us also running 1Password on our phones? Can we not use an/or edit records within the same 1Password master file while another 1Password client has opened that file? I imagine mere reading would not be a problem, but I am all the time editing records---but not necessarily the same ones as may be open on a different machine. And, despite the incident mentioned in my previous post, I'm fairly good as executing the 'Save' function after changing a record. Still, I find myself perplexed at the loss of data that happens to me (again, last night it happened again). In the past, but on rare occasions (2 or 3 times in 4 or 5 years), I have been confronted with DropBox's conflict reports -- I don't believe these are generated by 1Password --- which I have been asked to resolve; but, I have not seen that sort of thing happen in quite some time.

--Chris

khad

If you are "in the middle of an edit" then that means the changes haven't been written to disk, thus they are not synced via Dropbox since the change is not available to Dropbox to sync. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but why would you try to edit the same item at the same time on two different computers or devices? Perhaps if we understand your use case we can offer a better solution or improve 1Password in a way that would be helpful to you. Sometimes I can barely use one computer at a time let alone two. :)

leesweet

Just saw this post.... BTW, this lack of auto-save or any permanence when you switch away from 1P in the browser really hurts when you are trying to enter things like three security questions and their answers into the Notes field when the website doesn't even allow you to see the answers after you enter them!

So, when you have to save and reopen the record for that site after each question is chosen (and copied to the 1P entry) and again after each password is generated and copy/pasted (making six times with three questions...), you can see how badly persistence or auto-save is needed. I'd like the option of perhaps a 'draft' record that saves everything until you commit it. Unless you can find a better way to save all the security Q and A we need to save in the Notes field since we are using generated answers for obvious reasons! :)

khad

Thanks for the additional input on this! I'll pass it along to the developers.