Dropbox syncing questions & multiple vaults with 4.2

[Deleted User]

Hiya folks, thanks again for a great update!

I have a question about how best to accomplish the following:

I need two vaults, one for personal information, and one (maybe multiple) for work information. I'd like to use my personal Dropbox to keep these all in sync. I know I can setup syncing for multiple vaults independently, and this works great for me with the 4.2 update. Here's my wrinkle: When I'm on my work computer, I'd like the "work" vault to be the primary, and when I'm at home, I'd like the "personal" vault to be the primary. I'm not at all sure how to go about accomplishing this.

My first thought was to back everything up before trying anything -- can't lose anything. After doing this, I planned to setup syncing for my "work" vault to Dropbox, in ~/Dropbox/1Password/Work.agilekeychain. In fact, this already exists because I'm already syncing this way. So, I can sync this to/from home/work no issues. Same with primary. I guess where I'm getting hung up is with the notion of "primary". I'd really like to sync my personal vault to ~/Dropbox/1Password/Personal.agilekeychain, but at present it's using ~/Dropbox/1Password.agilekeychain, and I can't figure out 1) how to change this location and name or 2) how to even move the thing into a new location keeping the current name.

Really, ultimately, what I want are two vaults, named ~/Dropbox/1Password/{Personal,Work}.agilekeychain, the ability to keep each in sync from multiple computers using these paths, yet at setup time be able to pick which is primary for a given machine. I still want the "secondary" in this model to sync -- I don't really want to be further than cut&paste distance from either vault.

How can I do this? Am I thinking about this incorrectly?

And, for a bonus question, is the file ~/Dropbox/.ws.agile.1Password.settings still necessary? I'm guessing yes because it was updated, and I think this file is involved with determining the location of the "primary" vault.

Megan

Hi @JimMc,

Thanks so much for the kind words! I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the 4.2 update so far, and I'd be happy to help you out here.

I guess where I'm getting hung up is with the notion of "primary".

Essentially, what you would like to do here really does hinge on this notion. There are some fundamental differences in the way primary and secondary vaults are designed on the back end. (One of these is that the primary keychain cannot be renamed.) The primary vaults are set up in such a way as to hold the encryption keys for all secondary vaults. This allows you to access all your vaults after unlocking the primary. This also means that it could be complicated trying to turn a secondary vault into a primary vault and vice versa. This is something that we don't generally recommend.

I don't really want to be further than cut&paste distance from either vault.

Now, if you are looking for the quickest access possible to your whole database all the time, I'm wondering if multiple vaults is the right solution for you. Multiple vaults were originally designed with sharing in mind: a way to allow users to share some of their information with others (family or coworkers) while keeping their personal information private. For example, our support team has a vault with all of the Logins we may need access to, my husband and I share a vault with all our banking, medical and household information, and I have a fourth vault that holds all of the older account information that I don't use but am not quite ready to permanently delete yet, but don't want to see cluttering up my main database.

If you are the sole user of your 1Password information for both your personal and your work data, you might want to look into keeping things organized using Smart Folders. You can add a 'work' tag to all your work Logins and keep them nestled inside a Smart Folder. This will allow you to find them quickly without needing to switch between vaults.

Of course, how you organize your database is completely up to you, but we can't really guarantee that using your work vault as your primary at the office will work smoothly.

And, for a bonus question, is the file ~/Dropbox/.ws.agile.1Password.settings still necessary? I'm guessing yes because it was updated, and I think this file is involved with determining the location of the "primary" vault.

You're right, the ws.agile.1Password.settings file is necessary, at least for now. This is a pointer file that tells 1Password 4 for iOS where to find the keychain. When multiple vaults is enabled for iOS, this file will no longer be necessary, but for now we do recommend that you allow it to clutter up your Dropbox for a bit longer. :)

I'm sorry that I don't have a better answer for you here, please do let me know if you have any further questions.

[Deleted User]

The primary vaults are set up in such a way as to hold the encryption keys for all secondary vaults. This allows you to access all your vaults after unlocking the primary. This also means that it could be complicated trying to turn a secondary vault into a primary vault and vice versa. This is something that we don't generally recommend.

I have been wondering about this exact topic; thanks for the explanation, I sort of figured it was something along these lines. I'm not sure how I feel about this, to be honest. My natural reaction is to want a strict separation between vaults. In fact, I think that's really what I want in general: to dispense with the notion of a primary, and just manage multiple defaults myself. I may be alone in that, and it may not jibe at all with your vision for your product.

My particular use case revolves around having my personal info and work info completely separate. I work in IT, and I have a huge number of passwords to manage at work, not to mention things like X.509 certs, requests, keys, SSH/GPG key pairs, and so on. I've been using 1Password for a long time to vault these for archival/backup purposes, and with the separate vaults, I figured this was best. But your suggestion of using smart folders may well be a better solution. I don't have any particular need to share my vaults with other people today; the separation just made sense. Fortunately it's pretty easy to migrate the data between vaults.

So, thanks so much for the clear answer, and suggestion. I'm going to try and use tags and smart folders, and see how that works out.

Jasper

I'm glad Megan's suggestion was helpful! :)

And thank you for the feedback regarding multiple vaults.

Please let us know if you have any other questions!