Why is there no warning that edits to attachments will be lost

EllenH

This subject has been discussed previously, but the discussion is closed (https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/42757/editing-attachments) so, since nothing has changed in over a year, I'll add my recent experience.

I have a text file attached to an item in 1P. I opened and unlocked it (in BBEdit) and added a few paragraphs. I then saved and closed the file. I had forgotten to add something so I opened it again and discovered that my previous edits were gone. I figured I must have done something wrong so I started over. And lost my stuff again. I then thought: this is either a bug or a feature…

So I came here to see what it was and read the explanation you gave to the poster last year. I can understand that making attachments editable may be hard and is obviously not a priority. But I can't understand why there is no warning somewhere when opening an attachment saying, "Hey, be careful, any edits will be lost!" If I hadn't opened the file immediately, I would have discovered the problem somewhere down the line when I really needed the lost info that was long out of my memory.

I am now warned and will, hopefully, not make the same mistake again. Unfortunately, I'm really used to seeing warnings in situations like this, so my profound trust in 1P may strike again.

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1Password Version: 6.3.2
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: 10.11.6
Sync Type: Not Provided

Drew_AG

Hi @EllenH,

Thank you for taking the time to let us know about your experience with editing an attachment in 1Password. You've already read my replies in the other thread so I won't repeat myself here, but I do want to say that I'm truly sorry you lost the changes you made to that file. You're absolutely right - we don't make it clear what's happening when opening attachments, but we should. The lack of a warning led to your changes being accidentally lost, and we definitely don't want something like that to happen.

Normally I would have expected us to address an issue like this by now. I believe the reason we haven't yet is largely related to the fact that attachments are handled much differently in our new 1Password subscription accounts. Our developers were still figuring out how that would work at this time a year or so ago, and they wanted to get that nailed down first in case it had an effect on how attachments were handled in non-account vaults. Unfortunately that's still being worked on to a certain degree, but attachments in non-account vaults still currently work the same way as before. Hopefully we'll be able to add the warnings instead of waiting for more potential changes.

I'll add your feedback to our internal tracker to let our developers know about this. And again, I really do apologize for the trouble! If you have more questions about that, please let us know. Cheers! :)

ref: OPM-2857

EllenH

Hello,

It's me again and I did it again! Meaning I edited an attachment in 1P and, having forgotten my previous experience, I saved and closed the file, and then, fortunately, something in my unconscious mind told me to check that file again. I did, saw that my edits were gone, and remembered the problem. So I saved the file elsewhere, retyped my changes and put the new file back into 1P. Then I came here to see if there had been any progress on the subject.

My question is this: has this problem been solved or fixed in some way (at least a warning…) in the subscription accounts since it obviously hasn't been in the others?

Thanks,

By the way, I can't find how to change the info concerning the version of 1P and MacOS that I'm using.

Ben

Hi @EllenH,

Thanks for taking the time to follow up.

By the way, I can't find how to change the info concerning the version of 1P and MacOS that I'm using.

Posts on these forums can only be edited for a brief period of time. Since months of time have passed since your original post it isn't possible to edit it any longer.

That said you're certainly welcome to include that information in any future posts where it may be pertinent.

My question is this: has this problem been solved or fixed in some way (at least a warning…) in the subscription accounts since it obviously hasn't been in the others?

No. 1Password doesn't know that you've made changes to a Document unless you tell it you've done so by editing the 1Password item and replacing the old file with the new (that has the changes). When you open an attachment or Document from 1Password you're viewing a temporary decrypted copy and changes will not be saved back to 1Password. It just was never designed to do that. That isn't to say that we wouldn't consider improvements in this area in the future, but at present 1Password is more suited for static documents.

Thanks for the feedback.

Ben