Request Related To Archived Items

I've found myself struggling with this, too. As an example, this morning, I needed to refer to an old item that'd been archived, but since I didn't know what the title was (meaning the Find feature couldn't help), the only way to find it was to scroll through the list tediously looking at every item with enough care so as to not overlook my target. I have a thousand-plus items in the Archive, so needless to say, it was painful.

I also have the seemingly common problem of having moved a bunch of items from a number of archival vaults created pre-1P8 into the Archive, and I'm now grappling with how to remove the original vaults. There may be a workaround involving using labels and shuffling things around, but it's going to be annoying enough a process that I just haven't felt like dealing with it yet.

Having the ability to do a full search in the archive would solve all my problems. Since archived items are rarely needed by definition, I think it's fine if this is in-app only (no browser or QuickAccess support). Perhaps the best way to support this is by adding search syntax for filtering Archive items. This morning, my problem would have been solved if I could have done a search something like "=archived «string I know the item contains»", and my pseudo-archive problem could easily be resolved if I could do something like "=archived =vault:Foo" to find all the Archive items that belong to vault "Foo".

I suspect even the 1P product planners would like to see this latter feature. Why? When you look at a vault that is empty save for archived items, 1P8 shows something like this:

Any reasonable user would expect that button to take you to a list of the two archived items relevant to the selected vault, but instead, it dumps you in the Archive with no way to find the two items amongst the potentially thousands of items -- and you aren't given even the slightest clue what the items are; the only way you could identify them is to manually look at every item to see what vault it's in. This is the opposite of user-centric design, and is a perfect exemplification of why proper search in the Archive is necessary even though the items in there are not "active" items. I get that purpose, and I don't want Archive items showing up for autofill or in searches that don't explicitly target the Archive. But right now, the Archive in many cases fails at its sole mission in life: allowing you to reference inactive items when the need occasionally arises. It fails because if you can't find the item, you can't reference it.

After trying many ways to quarantine old items that need to hang onto "just in case", I have found myself here after searching for answers. 1Password's Archive looks promising and the Recently Deleted makes sense. But not having the option to keep tags and search in the archive based on tags is frustrating. Hundreds of work or personal items are mixed in the Archive.

I just found out that Command + Option + F gives you the search bar for Archive. Cool. One request fixed.

Now to be able to view just personal items in the Archive while I decide what to actually delete.

Others have had to resort to creating their own Archive "vault" which is just another vault. Seems to fix most of the concerns. I may have to go that route.

Former Member, thanks for contributing to this conversation. I'm not sure that 1Password has said either way whether or not the Archive feature is like " trashcan, just without the function to empty it and flush all items, so you can restore items in case you archived them in error". That functionality basically exists as Recently Deleted Items, where you can restore or destroy items for up to 365 days (last I checked).

Prior to Archive, I used a separate vault for archived items, which I considered to be any logins (or other types) that may still exist & are either active or in a dormant state, but that I don't want cluttering up my other items. All I was originally hoping for here was to have something as straightforward as a button to access the archived items through the browser extensions. I guess I could go back to my old method, but I figured I'd transition to the official 1Password way because I anticipated (& wanted to be ready for) 1Password to further improve upon & expand their implementation of Archive.

@yousayduh I understand. That's quite a challenge.

I would never handle 1000s of items manually. Only scripted. Manually would take many days of tedious work.

If I had that task to remove duplicates, I would create an export, then extract the *.json formatted vault data and write a script that reads this *.json data. Then the script would group all items by title, website and password. All items with these 3 fields identical are duplicates, and from such a group I would write the entry with the newest modification date to a file for re-import.

However, this all needs programming skills.

Former Member Thanks for your reply.

I do understand the purpose of the Archive. I am helping a less-technical family member who made a mess of their vaults after migrating from a stand-alone version of 1Password. There appear to be 3-4 copies of nearly every item. I believe the imported ones are safe to remove, but can't be 100% certain, and I am using tags to keep track of the source of these items. The dates aren't reliable either, as the most recently imported ones seem to show that they were modified on the import date, even if they weren't in fact modified. Of course, a duplicate detector would also be useful in this instance.

This person also struggles with 'fiddling' with the mobile app to switch the search scope. Perhaps if we can set a collection as the default search scope (in the Android app) I can set it up for them and the issue will be mitigated. I will try. But based on what nimvio has said, this may not work.

Once I move the suspected outdated items to the Archive, there will be 1000s of items there. As you point out, if "the need arises to review them", it would be helpful to support more nuanced review. The tags are there, it would be nice to be able to use them in the search to help with the process. A search semantics for the Find field such as tag:XYZ, title:ABC (analogous to from:ABC subject:XYZ in email search) could address this.

But I have set up the collections; let's see how it goes.

@yousayduh You seem to misunderstand the purpose of the archive. The archive is for final disposal of dead items, just without actually deleting them. You're not supposed to work with items you moved into the archive. It's a trashcan, just without the function to empty it and flush all items, so you can restore items in case you archived them in error. It's a huge unsorted heap of the items you don't need any more, but don't want to delete either, to still have the old information in case the need arises to review them.

So neither the default search nor the default tag list work for the archive. That's per design, that's the purpose (and not a flaw) of the archive.

If you want to move items "out of the way", consider moving them into different vaults and use collections to switch the search scope between the collections.

Thanks for the reply about my comment about accessing archived items outside of the normal way, 1P_Tommy. I like your mention about utilizing Collections. However, there's been a "bug" related to Collections that I haven't seen fixed yet for quite some time. That is, when I choose a Collection via the desktop app, and then I search for an item using Quick Access & open it directly in the 1Password app, the setting for Collections immediately gets changed to show the entire account, all vaults & items. This happens even when I open an item that's within the vaults that are within the Collection I've set. Hopefully that makes sense.

To test it out, open 1Password and pick a Collection from the dropdown menu, close the desktop app, search for an item using Quick Access, use the keyboard command (on Mac) Cmd +Shift + O, and notice the app defaults back to your account, not the Collection.

Thanks!

As a follow-up, another way to do (archive everything in an old vault) what I am trying to do would be to have a vault-specific Archive.

I saw https://1password.community/discussion/122298/how-to-move-items-from-a-bespoke-archive-vault-to-the-official-archive-trash that seems to suggest this is possible. But I don't see how to do this; I only see one Archive for the entire account.

Has this functionality gone?

Thanks.

Former Member I am attempting to do exactly what you suggest -- assign a tag to a group of items that I want to Archive. This is so that I can move them out of the way, and then go through them/find them as a group later. This is a workaround for not having vaults or subfolders within the Archive.

So, I just did a test where I added a tag to one of these items and moved it to Archive. I wanted to then see if I could find the item in the Archive via the tag. Some observations:
* Regular Search doesn't allow me to search only in the Archive, but using Edit->Find I can get a search box local to the Archive. (NB it is unintuitive to have two ways to search)
* I cannot "Find" by Tag. If I search for the tag label, the item doesn't come up (only items that happen to match the tag label in the title/record text)

Is there a way to add constraints to a search so that it searches (a) only the Archive, (b) only items with a certain tag [in the Archive]?

nimvio

I continue to have a vault used to hold some lesser used items (think relatives admin type items). You might look at placing the needed ones into an additional vault and then setting up one or more collections. You could have one that includes the new lesser used items vault but also one that does not. This is more of a forward thinking post as collections have not made it to 1Password in the browser, yet, I have my fingers crossed we'll see that at some point in the future. Collections in the browser is one of the things I eagerly anticipate.

For the browser you could optionally set the given vault you're using for lesser used items to not be show. This can be done from within the 1Password in the browser settings.