Moving items with scanned documents from standalone version to family version

george10548

After setting up a family account and moving items from the primary to personal vault, I noticed that documents that were scanned into, for example, Licenses, (or other categories) are now stored separately and linked to the saved item.

This makes for redundancy of items and is about the only thing that I find that I don't like about the family version.

I'm sure there's a technical reason for this, but I did prefer the way it was done in the standalone version.

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1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

Jacob

Hey @george10548! Thanks for mentioning this. With accounts, we created a different structure for attachments and made them separate items called Documents. We've gotten a lot of feedback about this, though, because it's a strange transition for folks who are used to attachments, so we're looking into some other options. :) Thanks for the feedback.

jsturtridge

+1

Jacob

:+1: :)

danemacmillan

Any updates on this?

I just got a trial for Families and this was the first thing I noticed. Thankfully, I didn't choose to move everything when I logged into the account for the first time and was prompted to do so, otherwise I would have had hundreds of documents irreversibly divorced from their Secure Notes. I tested copying and moving a couple of unimportant items before agreeing to such a nuclear option, before discovering the mess I saved myself from. This divorce of attachments from their Secure Notes is completely baffling. Furthermore, moving that just-moved-to-family-account Secure Note with attachments to another vault, like an offline one, does not bring the attachments with it; that association is lost forever. That to me is not a feature 1Password can excuse behind the veil of By-Design. Maybe it's by design, but it's unfortunately a completely awful decision. I find it hard to believe a team of developers deliberately agreed that this was a great idea. How did no one raise issue with it? How did no one utter words like "stupid" when this idea was first discussed? How is destroying people's data associations a good decision? This can't even be excused as an oversight.

Needless to say, my free year of 1Password Families will go unused. It's disappointing, because I was really looking forward to trying out all the new Accounts stuff. I can't iterate enough: this is an awful decision--completely awful.

Jacob

At the moment, linked Document items are used instead of attachments in 1Password accounts. This may change down the road, and I'll let the team know you're interested. Thanks for the feedback!

How is destroying people's data associations a good decision?

I wanted to clear this up as well. When you move items to your account, the attachments will be converted to Document items and linked to the item they were previously attached to. No data is lost. You can move things automatically in 1Password for Mac by signing in to your account. If you had one vault before using an account, the app will prompt you to migrate your data.

danemacmillan

When you move items to your account, the attachments will be converted to Document items and linked to the item they were previously attached to. No data is lost.

No data is lost until you then choose to migrate that data into an offline vault within the 1Password software on a computer. At that point the data association between the 1Password item and its attachments are completely gone. The attachments do not migrate, and there are no vestiges or references suggesting a previous association. It's gone forever, unless the user painstakingly re-attaches the documents to the item. That means the data is in fact lost, gone, and in every practical sense, destroyed.

Not only is that one issue, but should you be content with the By-Design data corruption, your list of items in 1Password is then completely littered with Documents that mean nothing on their own, because each are likely poorly named because their names did not matter when being attached to an item that provided the context for the attachments.

I don't normally resort to clichés, but you guys really dropped the figurative ball on this one. You guys dropped a kids' ball pit of balls; you guys dropped every ball pit from every McDonald's franchise of balls. You guys dropped every half-bleach-half-urine-covered ball in the world. It's unreal the number of balls you guys dropped. Superlatives can't even adequately describe the ball situation. I've never felt so repelled by such a droppage of said balls in my life. You guys should just abandon your software endeavors and commit fully to corporate ball droppage. If ball droppage were a sport, 1Password would reign champion. If this post had arms, you'd think it was casting wizard spells. Every finger on each hand would just be a digitus medius; that's ten whole digitus medius' raised at the same time. This is how I feel about this issue.

[T]he app will prompt you to migrate your data.

Fortunate for me, I disregarded the prompt, as experience has taught me that these type of first-time operations are usually destructive and counterintuitive. There should be advance warning that the integrity of your data will degrade, and ultimately be lost should another move be initiated. The prompt should default to a copy operation--not a move operation, which is far too nuclear.

rickfillion

Hi @danemacmillan,

You're absolutely right. We need to do better here.

So there's a few different issues here that all come into play. Let's look at them together.

We didn't like how attachments worked in 1Password. On many levels. So we wanted to try something different, something better: Documents. On nearly every level, Documents are better than Attachments. They can be downloaded on-demand, more than 1 item can reference the same document, and they're designed better from top to bottom (they make possible a bunch of features we haven't built yet but could never do with Attachments).

We really thought we'd like Documents. And for some things... we do. It's really cool to me that I can throw a file into 1Password, not associated to any item, and have 1Password keep an encrypted version of that file. But Documents + Linked Items made for a poor replacement to Attachments. Sometimes you want a file associated with an item, and it just doesn't make sense for it to accessible outside of the context of that item. We lost that, and we miss it. A lot.

We want to re-think the whole Documents thing. We think that we can get a lot of the benefits of the work we've put towards Documents but have something that ends up feeling a lot more like the Attachments that you know. We think we can have our cake and eat it too. We've got most of the technical bits for it decided upon, we just need to sit down and actually write the implementation. Unfortunately I can't give you a timeframe for when to expect something there because I've been burned too many times in the past when giving timeframes. Fixing this would fix your qualms with having a "Documents" category that represents your attachments.

We built a converter for Attachments to Documents. We didn't build the equivalent Documents to Attachments converter. Mostly because it's significantly more difficult. The actual conversion isn't that hard (download file, decrypt, re-encrypt, create reference). But the way that we copy/move items across vaults doesn't lend itself well to this kind of longer operations. It's complicated by the fact that you could possibly be offline in which case we may not be able to download the file data. We need to put work into all of that to make longer running processes more obvious to the user and allow for for the interface that could be necessary in cases like being offline. It's something we want to tackle, and it always feels like it's one of the next things for us to start work on, and yet it's still not done. I'm really sorry.

There's really four things that we need to fix here:

1. Move forward with the concept of file attachments in 1Password.com vault items
2. Change our converter to use file attachments instead of Documents + Item References
3. Build proper converter to convert files (be they documents or attachments) from 1Password.com vaults back to item attachments in non-1Password.com vaults
4. Build the better copy process that's needed to handle the longer running copy task and scenarios like being offline.

Now... regarding the migration prompt... You said ...

The prompt should default to a copy operation--not a move operation, which is far too nuclear.

Migration done by the app should absolutely always be a copy, and not a move. If we're doing 'move' anywhere when migrating your data from non-1Password.com vaults to 1Password.com vaults then we need to fix that.

The migration process should look like this:

• Create backup of your local vaults to give you an easy restore point
• Copy all items from Primary to the Personal vault
• Convert attachments to Documents + Item References
• Offer to remove the Primary vault. If you say yes...
• Disable sync of the Primary vault
• Do the encryption dance to change what's used to unlock the app
• Remove the Primary vault

At no point during any of this should it have modified your Primary vault, nor whatever you were syncing to. If you're seeing otherwise, please let me know and I'll make it my personal mission to get that fixed up as quickly as possible. Your old data should effectively not get touched in the process.

I'm really sorry that we've disappointed you. We'll try our best to do better.

Rick

danemacmillan

Has there been any progress on this?

Frank

Hi @danemacmillan - Thank you for following up. We're still are working on the best way to improve this, but we aren't ready to announce availability yet. Sorry for not having a better answer at the moment.