How do I merge duplicates?

tobsenmilch

I have duplicates that have been auto created. How do i easily merge these into single entries?

If more passwords don’t match, ideally most recent would be current and all others are previous passwords.

---

1Password Version: 7.0.6
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: iOS 11
Sync Type: Member
Referrer: forum-search:Merge duplicates

Ben

Hi @tobsenmilch

Were these duplicates created as a result of migrating from a standalone 1Password vault to 1Password.com membership?

Ben

tobsenmilch

No, they were created via the browser extensions and other means...

Ben

At present there is not a function to merge such entries. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Ben

cachanco

Do you have a project for this? The extension created several duplicates. And prevents the correct and fast filling in mobile devices

AGAlumB

@cachanco: 1Password doesn't create duplicates on its own; it only saves what you tell it to. So if you save a login at a website, and then later save another one there, you'll have two, and so on. The best thing to do is to determine which one you want to keep and delete the others. This isn't something 1Password can decide for you though, as it has no way of knowing your preference.

chriscalo

I can't say for sure what's happening, but I have a LOT of duplicates that showed up in the last several weeks/months. I know I didn't create all of them, so this feels like buggy behavior on the part of 1Password to me.

What would be lovely:

• a merge duplicates feature (check out Contacts+ for a great implementation example)
• better logic for finding close matches by domain and not suggesting (or creating) a new entry unless the user explicitly asks for it

AGAlumB

@chriscalo: If you can tell us the steps to reproduce the "buggy behavior" you're referring to, we can test it and should be able to easily verify. But we've had no other reports of 1Password spontaneously duplicating items. The closest I can think of is pressing ⌘ D in the desktop app when you think another app is focused but 1Password still is; that will create duplicates.

A "contacts" app is not even a remotely relevant comparison, as that data is not encrypted. "Merging" plaintext data is fairly easy, but not really feasible with encrypted data. I don't see what benefit would be had by merging duplicates though. Then instead of two items, you have one with two sets of duplicate details in it.

If you have actual duplicate items, 1Password for Mac Help > Tools > Clean Up Duplicate Items can help. "Close matches" are not duplicates though.

chriscalo

What I'm noticing aren't exact duplicates, but rather multiple entries for the same username and domain, most often with the subdomain differing.

I wonder if this is due to importing from Chrome passwords or iCloud Keychain. (Does 1Password do that?)

No matter the cause, I think the real issue is a lack of merge functionality. Duplicates will happen. Manually merging is so laborious that most people won't bother. 1Password would be better if it included a merge duplicates feature.

I brought up Contacts+ for:
1. Their UI for listing possible duplicates, allowing the user to browse through to make sure there's nothing unexpected before committing all of the merges
2. Their logic for deciding when to keep all values across duplicate contacts and when to keep one value.

A merge function in 1Password would need both of these, so it's useful to see how they solved the problem.

(I have no idea about implementation complexities such as encryption. That's for all of you to figure out. I'm just here to describe an unmet need as a user.)

chriscalo

FWIW, how I would love it to work is to merge entries where the domain matches (but not subdomain or path, for example, accounts.google.com and google.com) and the username matches.

It would be great if it could somehow highlight the differences (for example, "passwords do not match") and allow me to decide what to do.

Lars

Welcome to the forum, @chriscalo! We don't have a "merge" feature other than what you see with the existing Tools > Clean up Duplicate Items tool. The reason for this (historically) is that we've always erred on the side of having 1Password be very conservative with your data. The Duplicates tool doesn't merge/remove unless it's absolutely clear that the items are duplicates. We never want an AI being in a position to make decisions about which slightly-different version of your data is the "correct" one, since we're talking about some of your most valuable data. That means any non-automatic merge/"dupe"-removal is essentially a manual process anyway, and as a result, creating a specific interface for it is something that's just not risen to the top of our to-do list so far. It's something we've kept on the "someday, maybe" list for when we have spare developer cycles, but so far that's not yet happened. Thanks for letting us know you'd like such a feature; I've relayed your wishes to the development team.

chriscalo

Sounds great, Lars. Thanks for forwarding to the development team 👍

I'll find some way to deal with these duplicates for now.

Lars

@chriscalo - sounds good. FWIW, although I agree in general with your statement that "duplicates will happen," I also know from working with 1Password daily that they aren't entirely inevitable. Especially if you have a 1password.com membership, those days should be behind you unless you're doing a lot of migrating/copying/moving of data from other places. That's actually one of the benefits of a 1password.com membership -- a central repository where you don't have to worry about multiple sync keychains, some outdated, some new, in Dropbox or wherever. Point being: once you go through this process a single time, unless something odd happens, you shouldn't have to do it again. :)

mtheisen

Such a feature would be great. I have a lot of duplicates, because of different login domains. A manual merge command would be so helpful: Select 2 items, check if username + password match => merge by combining the "website" entries

Ben

Thanks for the suggestion, @mtheisen. :)

Ben

Unbelievabl

Hi, I am a new subscriber to 1Password. I like it very much, but I also seem to end up with a number of entries for the same website: one will have the password, and the other the username. It usually seems to occur when I have saved the password for a site once, and then another time I come into the same site, redirected, from a different URL, and I end up at a screen which has just a username entry field. Then when I enter that username, and select "Save in 1Password" - there is a second entry created. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk seem to create this situation (e.g. if I click on an Amazon.com link, I initially go to that site, but then when I go to buy a kindle book, I am told that I need to buy it from Amazon.co.uk because I live in the UK. Then I am redirected to a page on Amazon.co.uk with just the username... but for some reason 1Password doesn't have the username stored against the Amazon.co.uk login. So I end up with 2 logins on 1Password - one with just the username, the other with just the password - both pointing to amazon.co.uk)

That's just an example that happened this morning. I can fix it manually by going through my logins in 1Password and finding those entries and deleting one - say the username one - and copying its value into the empty username field of the password one.

It's ok when I only have 4-5 of those, but as I use 1Password more and more, I am worried that this maintenance will become a burden.

Ben

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with this @Unbelievabl. I have seen what you've described, but fortunately only rarely. I can see how it might become an annoyance if it were happening a lot. Sites not splitting the login process across multiple pages, which I'd argue offers no real security benefit, would be a good start. We'll keep an eye out for it, and see if there are ways in which we can help improve the situation from our end.

Ben

sampsa

Hi, I too would love to have a feature to merge duplicates. For example I have 5 duplicates of one login. This is due to following

1. I signed into 1password, and I was trying the service out. I logged into one site using it, and saved the login. (1 login)
2. I logged into the app for the site on my phone, but for some reason could not get the 1password to connect to previous login (+1 login)
3. Decided to start using 1password for good, so I imported my KeePass vault to 1password (which btw was way more harder than it should have been!) (+1 login)
4. Also imported all the logins from Chrome (+2 logins as there were duplicates due to different login entry points in the website = different url)

Now manually merging the duplicates seems pretty labour intense and error prone.

Would it be impossible to do a feature, where I can select two entries, and choose "Merge" from the tools menu, and then 1password would merge them automatically if possible. And if there are conflicts for fields (different passwords) allow me to choose which one to take. URLs, sign-in pages, linked apps and such could just create duplicate fields which I could then prune as I see fit.

I hope this makes sense :)

Ben

Hi @sampsa

Not impossible, no. We do need to be careful about merging logins that have completely different URLs on them though. It isn't an unsolvable problem, so hopefully we'll be able to address it in the future.

Ben

edtd

I'd just like to add that merging logins would be a great feature. 1Password currently tell me I have 156 reused passwords. Most of the reused passwords aren't actually reused; they just ended up as two separate logins in 1Password. Almost always because of using the same account on different subdomains, but 1Password also sometimes creates a second entry for a login with no username. Some sites also allow the username to be an email address or a username, and 1Password will save each as a separate login.

I'm sure I do have some passwords that are actually reused, but without the ability to merge logins, letting me know that I have reused passwords is pretty useless. It's way too cumbersome to fix the false positives so that I can find the actual passwords I need to change.

Ben

Thanks @edtd. :)

Ben

curusarn

I feel that I need to add to this discussion to describe the situation I got into because of a lack of duplicate merging feature.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone at 1password because I very much do appreciate what a great product you created.

I'm on Linux and I'm using the 1password X Chrome extension.

1) I have signed up for 1password and I imported my passwords from Google passwords.

In Google passwords, every item contains domain/URL, login, and password. Not every service uses a single domain/URL so this obviously creates many duplicate entries. Google passwords "solves" this by ignoring the issue.

In 1password I can have a single item that works for multiple domains/URLs so it makes sense to not have duplicate entries.
After importing all these passwords my Watchtower report looks like this:

(These are almost all duplicates. I almost never reuse passwords.)

2) I tried to see if I can clean up this mess.

I clicked on "View all" reused passwords; I was surprised to see all 150 items listed individually instead of being grouped by the password.

I was expecting to be able to select two items and merge them into a single one. Instead, I need to manually hunt down which items share the same password and then manually merge them.

Hopefully, you understand that there is no way I will do this for 150 duplicates.

3) 1password also creates duplicate entries.

You might want to tell me to clean up my messy data before importing it to 1password. That's fair. However, 1pasword also creates duplicates.

I went to twitter and logged in using login entry from 1password. I activated 2fa by adding OTP to the 1password extension.
For some reason, this created a duplicate entry.

The original item has twitter.com URL and the new one has mobile.twitter.com URL. I have no idea why 1password picked up the mobile website URL but it did.

It seems to me that duplicate removal is a feature that would not be only useful when importing passwords from other password managers.

4) What I would expect from 1password.

I understand that it is important to make sure that features like merging work for all the edge cases.
However, I do not understand why removing duplicates is not considered at all.

I would expect two things:
First, show me which other items share the same password instead of just displaying the generic "reused password" banner.
Second, let me edit the duplicates side-by-side so I can manually merge them.

I'm not sure if any of these features are available in native apps but I would appreciate if I was able to solve this using the extension.

Simon

Ben

Hi @curusarn

Thanks for the detailed feedback and specific examples here. That helps! So, we do actually have a start on a duplicate removal feature. It exists in 1Password for Mac. But unfortunately as-is it wouldn't have helped in either of the cases you mentioned, because it only considers exact duplicates. It is the first we've offered such a feature on any platform, so hopefully there is room to iterate on it and have it better address more cases.

Thanks!

Ben

marktenney2

@Ben Is this merge feature available on 1password for Mac now? Or something that's in development? I somehow have exact duplicates of the majority of my passwords in my primary vault and would love to merge them. Thank you!

ag_ana

@marktenney2:

Not yet, sorry! 1Password for Mac currently only offers the duplicate removal feature I am afraid.

jackvinson

Would love this too. I go to a website (in Chrome), and at some point am asked to create a password, where I use Generate Password. But that is after I've created a "login" name, so 1P doesn't see that and just creates a new "password" entry. Then that same website asks me to login with the username and password I've just created, and 1P creates ANOTHER entry for me. It would be awesome if 1P could figure out that the password it just generated is supposed to be attached to that new login.

ag_ana

Thank you for sharing your feedback here too @jackvinson!

(And welcome to the forum! :) )

Cavewoman

Hello!

I created this forum account because I was brought to 2 closed discussions about this feature addition when I googled "1password merge logins". In that thread there was an almost dismissive tone of "no one cares about this feature so we aren't putting it on the list". I do appreciate the frank discussion of what can or can't be done, instead of a vague "thanks for the suggestion, we'll look into it", but I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of those who would appreciate a feature like this! If I could select 2 logins to merge, then check or uncheck boxes for the merger, that would be super duper helpful. As it stands I have a lot of same logins saved 3-4 times from the different web addresses or mobile logins that come up.

Ben

Hi @Cavewoman

I sincerely apologize we came across as dismissive. We pass along all of the feedback that we receive, however we do also try to set realistic expectations when doing so. If we know something isn't being actively worked on, then we can have some confidence that it isn't coming in the near future. I'd much rather tell people that than leave room for the expectation that it might be coming in the next version, etc. :) This isn't something that we're actively working on for iOS, but we do already have a duplicate detection feature on Mac which may help. Which platform are you using 1Password on?

Ben

tcbarrett

I think it is quite clear what your users would like :)

I have been using 1P for over 6 years, and have wished for a merge feature for over 6 years.

I have one vault with 600+ "re-used passwords". Every single one generated by 1P.

My personal experience with you has been exemplary - everyone has been polite, helpful and amazing. Thank you!

Do you intend to add a merge feature?

Ben

Hey @tcbarrett

Many thanks for the kind words. I'm glad to hear the experience has been positive. As for a merge feature... it isn't something we're actively working on, though I wouldn't say that it has been ruled out. I think there is some potential that we could do something like what has been described in this thread, though with it not being actively worked on currently I wouldn't anticipate it in the short term.

I'll be sure to note your request for our development team.

Ben