No item history in moved items

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: How do I get to view previous passwords?.

philmcole

@ag_tommy For some reason, the "View previous versions" button doesn't show up in a specific login item, neither in 1Password for Mac nor on 1Password.com.

It does show up for the few other random logins I checked.

How can I see the history for this login item?

Dave_1P

@philmcole

Thanks for reaching out. Is it possible that you moved that item between vaults/accounts or duplicated that item at some point? Both of those actions won't move the item history.

If you didn't perform any of those actions then can you tell me how you edited the item? What specifically was changed?

-Dave

ref: dev/core/core#23297
ref: dev/core/core#31883

philmcole

@Dave_1P Indeed, the item was moved between two vaults. I checked and found an identical deleted item in the old vault which does have the history.

This is bad. Firstly, “move” implies transferring the original item instead of duplicating it and deleting the old. Secondly, and most importantly, it should transfer the whole item and not lose any data! Long edit histories over years might contain very valuable data for an item. Ask your developers if you could delete their underlying Git repositories - I bet they won’t like it. Currently, all that history data is silently lost! Now I need to figure out how much history data I have lost over the years thanks to 1Password vaults “move” being “incomplete copy”.

Dave_1P

@philmcole

At the moment this is done for privacy reasons. When you move an item to another vault, people who have access to the new vault will be able to view the item history of the moved item. You might be okay with sharing the item with the current information that it contains but you might not be aware (or might have forgotten) that a previous version of the item has sensitive information, or a file attachment, that you didn't intend to share.

The team is currently looking into how to improve this behaviour in the future and I'll make sure that your comments are added to the internal conversation. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

-Dave

philmcole

@Dave_1P It should be the decision of the user, not 1Password silently deleting information because it thinks the user is too incompetent. Shared vaults are a corner case - I bet there are more non-shared vaults than shared vaults. If you really think your users are that incompetent, why not give a warning when attempting to move between vaults “heads up, moving an item includes past history, are you sure you want to proceed?”. Or offer additional options “move without history” and “copy without history”. Losing information silently because you assume your users are too incompetent to know what they’re doing just isn’t good.

Dave_1P

@philmcole

I personally agree that letting the user decide whether to retain the item's history when moving an item to a shared vault would be the best option. A prompt that asks the user to confirm that they'd like to share not only the currently active item with folks who have access to the destination vault but the previous versions of the item as well makes sense to me.

I've shared your suggestion with the team. Thank you for the feedback.

-Dave