How do I merge duplicates?

ikjadoon

Another major positive to implement a merge feature: many families use separate password managers before they all come to 1Password and it's unfortunately too easy to cause a headache. Especially when users are new to 1Password: bam, we hit a confusing UX problem.

Say:

• Mom (Bitwarden)
• Dad (Dashlane)
• Brother (RoboForm)
• Older sister (LastPass)
• Younger sister (iCloud Keychain)
• Me (Chrome)

Then everyone migrates to 1Password via imports to their private vaults.

1. 1Password recommends family members to move shared logins into the Family Vault. Whoops: six Netflix logins.
2. A shared computer (e.g., kitchen, living room, share iPad, etc.) migrates its logins and those go to the shared Family Vault. Whoops: seven Netflix logins.
3. People start testing each login and then rename them. Users deal with "Netflix - working", "Use this Netflix", and "Netflix latest 2022" logins.

It's just too easy to screw this up, and for non-technical people, become a deep friction point. "I hate this shared vault."

Some important notes:

• To avoid losing passwords and / or confusing users, perhaps this feature defaults to only merge logins with the same passwords (e.g., done locally)
• The merge tool should present users a choice to move which vault the merged login resides in
• The merge tool should ideally have an "undo merge" option for some period of time, if they were genuinely separate logins

kalfa

Any news on this?

I use 1password on osx and android.

I ended up having duplicates of the same login entry, since the "linked apps" on adroid has one entry and the web login (normally used on osx) has a different one.

so the two features i see really important are:

• merge or linking two entries, or at least the ability to copy data from one to the other (and then remove one). e.g. copy linked apps on one to the other
• edit the linked apps manually, at least on android, the same way I can edit linked websites

with at least one of them I can edit one entry and drop the other.

the problem with having two entries is not purely aesthetic, it's that when I change password on one, the other is not updated, which defeat the purpose of a password manager.

kundrnik

This would be WONDERFUL to have — at least for merging duplicates/similar objects in the same vault.

ag_tommy

Did someone ask for a duplicate remover? Please check the desktop Mac beta.

You can now see a list of your duplicate items in the app. Choose “Items with duplicates” in your Watchtower dashboard to see or delete all of your duplicates.

https://releases.1password.com/mac/beta/

tb582

@ag_tommy I assume this is live in prod and out of beta ? and I guess its a duplicate remover and still not something to merge ?? ie I've selected three entries that I just want all merged into one...

ag_tommy

@tb582

Production, yes. Also, yes this is a duplicate remover. Not a merge tool. Merging would still be a manual task at this time. I'll pass along that you're interested in a merge tool.

tb582

the whole ask of this 3 page thread was about merging lol

ag_tommy

A large portion of the time folks ask for merging when they may actually want duplicate detection removal.

ShadowXVII

So I've just been testing moving from another PW manager to 1Password and started with 600 entries which turned into 900 once imported into 1PW.

A large majority are those which should be merged (not duplicates) i.e. A site might have multiple domains (login.domain.com, domain.com, auth.domain.com) and I'd want a quick way to combine these entries into one...

• Just a simple select 4 entries, merge.
• If passwords match, don't add a duplicate value.
• If metadata is unique to an entry (i.e. website), add it to the new entry.

But if I'm doing that by hand, I'd be out of my mind ;)

Dave_1P

Thank you for the feedback! As Tommy mentioned, 1Password 8's Watchtower has a new duplicate detector tool that we hope will help some folks who see multiples of items that they'd like to clean up.

I know that the duplicate detector tool won't help everyone's use case here (since the tool will only identify exact copies as duplicates) and your feedback and requests regarding a merge tool continue to be passed along to our product team.

-Dave

ref: PB-37932851
ref: PB-37933023

janhoy

This would be nice. Look at e.g. macOS' Contacts app, you can select two contacts and go to "Card" menu and merge them. Of course you need ot know that they are actually for the same login/site/user, but that is true with many other features in many tools, why keep such a feature away from power users fearing that novice users will shoot themselves in the foot?

ShadowXVII

Whether it remains being called remove duplicates or merging the key is both in the matching and smushing together of multiple entries.

Short of writing a script via CLI, I can't think of an easy way to combine these hundreds of duplicates.

Maybe duplicates can have a confidence level?

• Exact match on all data (identical) = high confidence
• Matching root domain & matching password hash = medium confidence, option to merge

The remaining duplicates are those from day android, which use the android:// syntax when importing from other PW managers.

Dave_1P

@janhoy

1Password stores mission-critical data that, if merged incorrectly, could easily result in data loss. Merging two contacts incorrectly usually has a low impact since you can always ask someone for their address or phone number again. But if two logins are merged incorrectly, this can lead to permanent and irreversible data loss and to being locked out of important accounts.

We take our responsibility to safeguard your data seriously. This doesn't mean that we'll never introduce a merge feature, it means that we want to make sure that we get it right when or if we do.

I've passed along your request for a merge tool to the team as well. 🙂

@ShadowXVII

Would you mind sending an email to support+forum@1Password.com? The team would be interested in learning more about the import flow that resulted in generating so many duplicates so that we can see if we can prevent that issue from happening in the first place.

After emailing in, you'll receive a reply from BitBot, our friendly robot assistant with a Support ID that looks something like [#ABC-12345-678]. Post that here, and I'll be able to locate your message and make sure it's gotten to the right team. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-38099066

ShadowXVII

@Dave_1P , I prepared a sample case of 1 entry turning into 3 however I haven't got a reply from "BitBot" yet.

Dave_1P

@ShadowXVII

Thank you! I've located your ticket and left a note summarizing our discussion here. One of my colleagues will review your email, and our conversation here, and get back to you via email as soon as possible. Please continue the conversation there. 🙂

-Dave

ref: SAF-72781-981

dkg

I ran onto to the "Duplicate Tool" rather by accident during one of my many attempts at cleaning up the items in my single vault. The tool activation seems to be sporadic and there is no indication of what triggers it. According to the Watchtower section of 1P 8 - MacOS, I have 548 duplicates. But only a very few of them seem to trigger the "remove Duplicate" pop-up. I wonder what I am missing in this operation.

ALSO - put me down as a big proponent of a "Merge" capability. Ideally this little tool would open two windows side-by-side that enabled the user to view both items with all "conceal" triggers turned off so that the field mergers could be easily verified. Is that sort of functionality on anyone's drawing board ?

johyphenel

Couple comments:

1) I don't think folks realize how big an issue this is for new users coming from other managers (in my case Google / Chrome) — more below.

2) It seems like "we don't know how to merge things that have different usernames / passwords" is used as a reason to not add this feature, but most of the people who have this problem are talking about multiple entries with the exact same username and password, just with different website URLs.

To elaborate on (1), moving over from Chrome, I now have 5-10 entries in 1password for each of my most used logins — every bank login, credit card login, steaming login, amazon, etc etc. At the time of transfer these were 1 item in Chrome, which then gets "duplicated" during import to be 1 item for each subdomain. All with the exact same username:password.

To me this seems like a bug in the import tool of 1password — but it's a horrifying user experience to realize that there is no "select N entries > right click > merge" feature, and no auto detected "we suggest you merge these items" feature. These are really easy to detect.. Same username, same password, all have domains that end in "amazon.com" ....

I am really liking 1 password, but I'm also an engineer with high tolerance for jank — I don't think I can convince the rest of my family to move over until experiences like this get better.

Edit: I am on 1Password for Mac 8.10.28 — and I don't see any duplicate removal option on Watchtower, so I have to assume these aren't being detected as duplicates.