Customer wants to share his Dropbox vault with me

iCoco

You’ve already helped me to share a vault with my wife, and it’s working like a charm. :) Today I have a similar sharing issue, but the situation is a little different:

I have recommended 1Password to a customer. He has now installed 1Password on his Dropbox, and syncing among his own devices works perfectly as expected.

Now we want to share the customer’s vault with me, so that it will show up as separate vault right within my own 1Password. Therefore, he has shared with me the 1Password folder which is stored on his Dropbox under Dropbox/Apps/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain.

I accepted the sharing invitation. To keep things tidy in my own Dropbox, I moved his shared folder to a different location that better suits me, and renamed the file from „1Password.agilekeychain’ to „customername.agilekeychain“.

However, I am unable to find and include it with my own 1Password.

What did I do wrong? And what would you suggest so we can achieve this?

Megan

Hi @iCoco,

I'm glad to hear that your vault setup with your wife is working well. :)

Now, let's get this new vault sorted out. First of all, a bit of a digression: from the keychain name ( 1Password.agilekeychain ) it sounds to me like he's sharing his primary vault with you - is that the case? Generally, we'd recommend that he create a secondary vault (that is already named something clever) and keep his own primary vault for his personal information. We suggest this because it's far simpler to delete a secondary vault should you need to make any changes than it is to reset the primary vault. If the user has 1Password for his own use in addition to the shared vault with you, we might want to consider a bit of a re-organization before we go ahead with the sharing.

In any case, I'll need to know a bit more about where you are unable to find this shared folder. Do you see it in Finder, in your Dropbox folder? The simplest way to add a secondary vault from an existing keychain is to double-click that keychain file in Finder. 1Password will pop open and prompt you for that vault's Master Password.

iCoco

Hi @Megan,

thank you for getting in touch. :)

I understand your suggestion about secondary vault. However, lets pretend we'd want to share his primary vault nevertheless. So my customer already shared his appropriate Dropbox folder with me - and I can perfectly see this folder and the contained 1Password.agilekeychain file in my Dropbox. Now my plan would be like this:

1. This shared folder is now shown on first level in my Dropbox. To tidy things up, I want to move this shared folder a few levels down in my Dropbox, right into a customer's folder.
2. Then I guess I'd want to rename the contained "1Password.agilekeychain" file to something like "mycustomer.agilekeychain", so that in my 1Password app the vault would show up as "mycustomer" and not mess up with my own primary vault.

Does that make sense?

However, when I open 1Password on my Mac, I am unable to find this vault.
So what do I have to do to make it accessible within my 1Password App?

iCoco

Ok, I guess I found out what was wrong in the setting I described above:

1.) Having located the customers shared folder on my Dropbox, I can first rename this folder (too keep things clear).
2.) Then I'd want to move it into my own 1Password folder on my Dropbox - rather than into a separate customers folder!
3.) Now when I double click the agilekeychain file, 1Password opens and I get prompted to add this as a new vault.
4.) Here I give the vault a name and color (so I don't even have to rename the customers 1password.agilekeychain file), and click done.

From now on this vault is accessible in my own 1Password app and will be kept in sync.

That's it. Right? :)

iCoco

Addendum:

However, when I want to add this customer's vault to 1Password app on my iPhone, I don't see the possibility to give it the customers name (so the vault's name would say "1password").

Or do I?

rickfillion

Hi @iCoco,

If you're intending on syncing things back and forth with this customer, I think you'll want to consider a slightly different approach. If I remember correctly, Dropbox will let you move the shared folder to any location within your dropbox and everything will still work exactly as expected. But you cannot move a file that's within a shared folder outside of the shared folder, and have it still sync.

So if the customer shared their Dropbox/Apps/1Password/ with you as 1Password, then you should only be moving this 1Password folder, and not what's inside of it. You can create a folder inside of your own Dropbox/Apps/1Password folder named something like CustomerName, and put the 1Password folder of theirs inside of that.

You'll want to check with the customer to see if they still have the file after you moved it.

From then your path seems fine. You can double click it, which should cause 1Password to ask you to add it. Alternatively you can add a new/empty vault to 1Password for Mac, then go to Preferences/Sync and connect it to the customer's agilekeychain.

As for iOS... it lacks the ability to name vaults, and takes on the name of the vault that's encoded inside of the vault. Because it was the customer's primary vault and we don't allow renaming that one, the iOS device is using that same name. Managing these things on both Mac and iOS is something we want to make better in a future version. Users should be able to change the vault's name, icon, color, etc after the fact. We'll get there eventually.

I hope this helps. Let us know how it goes.

Rick

iCoco

@rickfillion Thank you, Rick, for your answer. Yes, I moved and renamed the shared folder, not the file inside alone - just as you described. As far as I can see, everything is working fine now on 1PW/Mac. :)

It's good to know that renaming will someday come to 1PW/iOS, too. Apart from that, I understand that it's recommended to use secondary vaults for sharing - as this approach would solve this renaming issue. (For now I'won't include this vault on my iOS device, as it's okay if I am connected to this customers vault on my Mac only.)

Drew_AG

I'm happy to hear it's all working correctly for you now, @iCoco! On behalf of @rickfillion, you're very welcome. If you ever need more help, just let us know. We're here for you! :)