Multiple copies of 1P are not synced correctly.

craighind

Hi,

I have to say I've been getting less and less trusting of the 1P apps recently. For a while now I've been noticing that all my devices have different amounts of items available within 1P. Today I come to log in to a share trading platform that has multiple levels of passwords, and while I was able to log in, I was not able to find the 'trading' password that was previously stored in 1P. If I can not trust 1P to store my passwords as a single repository I will not be able to use it in future. While I would never have deleted that password from any of my devices, I do have to wonder if the problem doesn't stem from the fact that all my devices have a differing number of items stored. How do I know which device stores the master list? Do any of them? Or do they all contain a subset of each other? I thought ok, no problem, I'll just restore a backup only to find that restoring a backup will replace the current vault. That's no good, although I suppose I could have isolated the latest backup and gone back to it at a later stage. Then I remembered 1P Anywhere. Nope iCloud doesn't support that. Ok I'm good with backups, I'll just restore a Time Machine backup from when I had 1P syncing to Dropbox. I managed to find a copy of the last Dropbox sync from over a year ago. Now what's the password to log in through 1P Anywhere? Since I change my master passwords regularly, it took a lot of thinking before I finally worked through all my old passwords. Anyway, I have that password now and that's no longer a problem.

Now I first noticed this happening after I switched sync from Dropbox to iCloud. Not that Dropbox was perfect because sometimes the devices refused to sync on Dropbox and after fiddling I'd find that they would re-sync only to find duplicate items in the vault. Still duplicates are better than lost passwords.

So currently my situation is this:

I have 1P 4.4.1 (441006) Mac App Store Edition, syncing only to iCloud. I have this on two computers. My desktop and my notebook (both Macs running 10.9.3).
I also have 1Password 4.5.2 on my iPhone and 1Password 4.5.3 on my iPad.

All devices sync to the same iCloud account. I've checked many times.

On my iPad 1P has 315 items.
On my desktop 1P has 315 items.
On my iPhone 1P has 220 items.
On my notebook 1P has 220 items.

Until recently the phone had a different amount again, but seems to have successfully synced the full amount.

I find it weird that two devices have the same amount, and other two do too, but a different amount. Now if I find that a password is missing on one device and find it on another, and I modify that entry slightly, such as to add a note to it to cause it to re-sync, suddenly it becomes available on the other devices. I've already tried deleting 1P from all but one of my devices in an effort to get them all to sync again from one data set, but it didn't work. They all came back with the same numbers again.

Next I will probably try remove sync from all devices, then clear three of them, and delete all info for 1P on iCloud and let the master copy (my desktop computer) sync them all back up to iCloud (and make a backup sync on Dropbox) and then get all the other devices to re-get all their info from iCloud.

Of course all this takes time that I don't really have, so I thought I'd put it here to see what others suggest before I continue.

So... any ideas?

Thanks
Craig

Megan

Hi @craighind,

I'm so sorry to hear that you've been having trouble with iCloud sync lately. Now, there are a few very basic things that we need to check before we get into the more detailed troubleshooting:

• Please ensure that you are logged in with the same iCloud account on all computers and devices. (If you're like me and have somehow collected several, this could be where things are getting tangled!)
• Please ensure that 'Documents and Data' is enabled for iCloud on all devices.

If those items check out, let's reset sync:

• On your iOS devices, open 1Password 4 for iOS, tap Settings > Sync > Sync Service and tap 'Disable Sync’.

• On the Mac, open 1Password 4 for Mac, and click the 1Password menu, then Preferences. Click Sync, and click Change syncing.

• Check the box to remove the data from iCloud and confirm that you want to disable sync.

• Restart the Mac and iOS devices.

• On the Mac, go back to the Sync preferences, and enable iCloud.

• Wait about 20 minutes to give iCloud time to run the initial sync to all devices.

• Go back into the iOS app and re-enable iCloud sync. It should work this time.

craighind

Thanks Megan. I haven't had a chance to try this yet but I will as soon as I get a moment.

Jasper

On behalf of Megan, you're welcome! Let us know if that fixes it once you have a chance to try it. :)

craighind

I finally got all the devices to report the same amount of items, but not without more fiddling than what Megan mentioned above.

Once I got the two Macs syncing, then one had one more record than the other. I found the offending item and recreated it and deleted the old one. This seemed to get them to be the same amount of items. Then I re-enabled sync on the iPad and this got the correct amount of items.

On the iPhone sync would not re-enable. It kept saying that it could not get all the band data from iCloud. In the end I deleted all 1P data from the iPhone and let it download all the items from scratch. That seemed to fix it.

I'll keep an eye on it for a while and see if they go out of sync again. If they do then I'll switch back to Dropbox syncing and see if that's any better.

Cheers
Craig

sjk

Thanks for the detailed followup, Craig ( @craighind ).

I'm glad you've been able to get consistent item counts in 1Password data on all your systems/devices using iCloud syncing. Sorry it took more fiddling than desirable to accomplish that and I do hope it remains reliable.

If you'd like more help with this or anything else please let us know. Have a great week!