New to 1password (bought from MacAppStore), question about booting clones/dropbox

ssls6

I'm new to 1password but like it. I've set it up to sync with iCloud, did the same with my iphone/ipad. It looks like everything is working great. I've finally started using good passwords for things like dropbox, schwabb, ....which I'm happy about. The built in keychain manager always let me down whenever using a good recommend password :(

Here is my question. I often boot clones of my various macs for testing purposes. Whenever booting a clone for the first time, dropbox will open up and want authentication. Now that I have a good dropbox password, how do I get it in? Open up 1password and manually copy it? Before I start experimenting I wanted to ask because I'm sure some of you have booted a clone and already worked the best method out.

littlebobbytables

Hi @ssls6,

I don't really use clones for anything other than a safety net during big updates or similar so while I'm maybe not the best person to ask I am cautious.

In the future, before you create clone I would probably recommend temporarily disabling syncing in 1Password and actually any other place too that you can think of. Depending on how long you keep a clone for you may not want to fire up a 2 month old clone that for testing purposes is perfectly fine but has old data. I may very well be extremely overcautious here, it's just I wouldn't want to see any harm come to any of your sync data by suddenly introducing multiple copies of old vaults into the mix.

With syncing disabled though you can fire up 1Password and do as you suggested. For times like this what you might prefer to do to update a clone is to copy a recent Backup from 1Password on your active system and 'restore' it on the clone. I have a Mac running Mavericks and that's actually what I do as I'm not concerned about it being up to date on a day to day basis. So every so often I simply copy a backup and restore it to update everything in one go.

If you have any questions about any of that please do ask and I won't take any offence if you want to wait for other answers too :tongue:

ssls6

Thanks for the comments :)

thightower

@ssls6

I always, do just as you surmise. However I have added some information through out the post and a recommendation at the end.

I open 1Password and copy the Dropbox password out, then supply it to Dropbox. Actually I never open Dropbox until I have the password out of the vault.

I personally don't reactivate any Dropbox linkings unless it is within a day of creation.

The asking for authentication is part of a safety measure from Dropbox's end to prevent someone from copying your database from one machine to another and having a compete working copy.

• In your situation, I would recommend using a good Virtual Machine platform and keeping guest OS's that will allow pasting of passwords between the Host/Guest OS's. Rather than firing up old clones. Its far safer IMHO.
• What I do / did was keep a complete copy of my OS's minus any large things like Dropbox, etc. I can always copy over any documents from the Main OS's. You can also paste passwords across from the Host OS.
• I do not recommend constantly moving between OS's and different installed version of Dropbox. You can possibly loose valuable data. Very easily.
• The reason I do not keep 1Password or Dropbox on the Virtual Machine is they (VM's) are smaller and leaner. If they ever need to be recreated they can be done with relative ease. Should you ever need to send a copy of the Virtual Machine to a colleague you can do so without sharing personal data.

Being a moderator at the Dropbox forums I see all kinds of wonky messed up data sets. Some of which come from Opening old data sets. I can only strongly caution you against using clones as your current setup / usage pattern seems to indicate.

cc/ @littlebobbytables

MikeT

Hi @ssls6,

One thing to keep in mind if you're using Yosemite as the main OS. It has a bug where if your clone drives are attached, it will sometime launch a copy of 1Password mini from the clone drive instead of the right one on the main drive. You'll get a prompt from 1Password when this happens.

In addition, I agree with @thightower about the virtual machine tip. If your testing involves software and not the OS itself, try using VMs instead. There is a free one like VirtualBox you can try to see if it works for you but there are better ones that requires a payment.

You can also clone VMs to do versioned testing and certain VMs like Parallels can support linked clones where it doesn't require the whole drive to be cloned but rather do increment clones that's based on the original clone. Some certain VMs also support integration with cloud drives by directly using your machine's copy of cloud drives instead of downloading another copy. It is really helpful when you have 20gb worth of Dropbox data and you can share the same copy between multiple VMs instead of having to download 20GB each (or do a selective sync).