Frustrating Setup Experience for 1Password on iPad Pro

awiltschko

Just a case study for folks, in case it's useful.

Fresh install (Dec 17, 2016) of 1Password and Dropbox on an iPad Pro, 12.9" with keyboard case.
I have an existing 1password vault stored in the top-level folder of Dropbox that I have successfully linked with my iPhone 7, Macbook Pro, and Windows 10 machine.
When trying to start up 1Password directly from a Dropbox vault, a "blank" vault appears on the list of vaults to choose. When I click it, the app crashed every time (attempted ~5 times, then deleted the app and dropbox, and started again, and it crashed reliably another ~5 times).

So, instead, I created a vault from scratch, and then enabled syncing via Dropbox. I first made a backup of my vault on my laptop before doing this, as I was nervous that syncing an empty vault with Dropbox would overwrite the contents of the existing one. The first 3-4 tries resulted in a nondescript error, saying something like "There was an error looking up keychains".

For no reason that I can see, after several failed attempts, 1Password found my existing vault, and started a sync with the existing keychain. Things look like they're working well now.

I've been using 1Password for several years now, and every new device I set up on is always frustrating, and always in a completely new way. I value the app very highly once it works, but for a $10 app, the setup process should be a great deal smoother.

PS — if you save a draft of a post on this forum, and try to repost it, the category field greys out all viable options, and you have to recreate the post from scratch.

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1Password Version: 6.5
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: 10.2
Sync Type: Dropbox
Referrer: forum-search:1password can't find existing vault stored in dropbox

Ben

Hi @awiltschko

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. We have had a fair bit of feedback from customers that the process to set up syncing with 3rd party sync providers is not as smooth of an experience as desired, especially when getting into multiple keychains or trying to share keychains. We've created a new service to resolve these problems, and you can read more about it here:

1Password

If you're already all set up with Dropbox and happy with that arrangement then it may not be something of interest to you, but we are pointing new customers in that direction to avoid some of these types of headaches.

Thanks!

Ben