The 1Password Community forums are in read-only mode from Jan 28th - Feb 4th, 2025. Find out more.

Need advice on combining Dropbox synced and iCloud synced vaults

osabina
osabina
Community Member
in Mac

Longtime customer, at least from version 3 (or longer?) which is probably partly how I ended up in this situation. That and the evolution of .mac->mobile me->icloud->icloud drive.

I have are two fairly identical vaults that have both continued to be updated, diverging over time. I realized I must have two when new things on Desktop were not appearing on iOS and vice-versa - a lot of my most commonly used info was old enough to be ok in both places, so unfortunately I didn't notice for quite a while. Then I lived around it for a bit, but associated pain has reached the Must Fix This Now level.

My first longtime, originally from desktop, vault is synced with Dropbox. With a Touch ID enabled iPhone, I started using the iOS app more often. At some point around iOS 8(?) I must have cloned the Dropbox vault into iCloud at some point maybe thinking I would consolidate on one cloud storage service.

Instead what I ended up with was two Primary vaults, one on iOS/iCloud, and the other on desktop/DB. I managed to get my iOS devices to see both, but clearly not an awesome situation.

I can't desert the iCloud one entirely as there are some more up-to-date entries there.

So I'd like to merge the two existing vaults, ideally into a third vault, keeping the others around in case I screw something up badly. Trying to sort out a merge on the phone seems terrible and I have the AgileBits version of the desktop app, so it appears I cannot get to my iCloud vault without spending another $50, which seems crazy for someone whose spent a lot on 1P throughout the years. Ugh.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to accomplish this (even if it is spending $50). Ideally I'd end up with all three vaults in DB with the new merged one as Primary everywhere and the others named something like old_ios and old_db. And remembering to NEVER put any vaults on iCloud.

Thanks,

Oz

1Password Version: 5.3.2 (agilebits)
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: 10.10.4 / iOS 8&9
Sync Type: both (see note)

Comments

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hello @osabina,

    You'll be glad to know this is definitely possible and even though we'll have to perform the merge in your primary vault on your iOS device you can perform all your vault maintenance afterward on your Mac and we can ensure you have a safety net before you start.

    1. Create a backup on your Mac using the File > Backup menu option.
    2. Create a backup on one of your iOS devices by following the steps in the Creating manual backups section of our Creating and restoring 1Password backups in iTunes (iOS) page.
    3. Next you will want to switch from iCloud to Dropbox on the same iOS device as used in step 2. The steps can be found in How do I switch to Dropbox Sync from another method? at the bottom of the page. You will be asked if you want to merge, that's okay.
    4. The merge may take a couple of minutes as the first sync to Dropbox will touch every file. Once complete all of the changes should also be visible from your Mac.
    5. The easiest approach with your other iOS devices is probably to start over with an empty vault and have it pull the merged vault from Dropbox.

    What can you expect when you merge two vaults?

    We adopt a conservative approach. We will only merge items from two vaults if they have the same Universally Unique ID (UUID). If they don't we treat the as individual items. They can share the same title, username and password but unless the UUIDs match they're treated as separate items. In these instances you will see duplicates requiring you to manually remove one. When you do this I would recommend ensuring you don't have any unique information held only in one copy. If an item in each vault has the same UUID we will merge the two. Where the data is the same in both it's easy, there is nothing to do. When there is different data in each we will keep one set of the data where it normally resides and place the other set in a custom section titled Conflicts. This way we don't risk throwing anything important away and instead leave it to the user to ensure the good data is kept and the now obsolete data is removed. On top of this you have a backup on both your iOS device and your Mac should you wish to simply return to a pre-merge state.

    How do you feel about all of that? Should you have any questions or concerns before starting please do ask and we'll do our best to answer them :smile:

This discussion has been closed.