copying items with references between vaults!
I tried copying my drivers license to a new vault and got a message that the references would be lost.
As part of the conversion from 1p6 to 1p7 there was a note about converting attachments to files or something like that, and my drivers license entry had attachments for the front and back image of my DL, similar to my passports, and any ID entry etc. The physical image is just as important as the data, but for some reason we broke this by apparently not allowing an option for copy/move between vaults to copy the references as well.
Am I missing something? More importantly, can this be fixed ASAP? Copy/move between vaults should at least offer an option to copy/move references as well and keep them intact during the copy/move operation. Otherwise how can we copy/move an item without losing important data (the attachments, now references)? I do realize it's not a trivial feature to add due to all the possibilities (the files may or may not exist in the destination, for example.)
I find attachments to be one of the great features of 1P and haven't used multiple vaults until I installed 1P7.
Not being able to copy/move an item and keep it's references intact sort of breaks things for me.
Is there a workaround I'm not aware of?
Thanks,
David
ETA: This post mirrors a support request #ZDD-51896-683
1Password Version:1Password 7Version 7.0.4 (70004001) AgileBits Store
_Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version:MacOS 10.13.5
_Sync Type: Not Provided
Referrer: forum-search:vaults
Comments
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As part of the conversion from 1p6 to 1p7 there was a note about converting attachments to files or something like that...
The conversion is from direct attachments to Documents, and it's not in going from 1Password 6 for Mac to 1Password 7 for Mac, it's part of converting from a standalone setup to a 1password.com account.
When you switch from standalone vaults to a 1password.com membership, any files that were previously directly attached to your individual records will be converted to the Documents format in your 1password.com account. These are similar, but have several key advantages over the older, direct-attached format. First, they are linkable to but separate from the records with which you associate them. In your Driver's License example, those photos were directly embedded in the Driver's License record. With Documents, each photo becomes its own item in your 1Password database, with its own UUID, and it can be viewed separately from the associated record, and it can also be linked to multiple records, With a drivers license, this is probably less important. But if you have a receipt for a software bundle of ten apps, say, and you create ten separate Software License items, one for each license you bought in a bundle, you can take a screenshot of the entire bundle receipt, import it once, and then create a link in 1Password for Mac from each Software License to that same receipt -- so you'll never forget which one you attached it to.
When you first convert, you will have to go back through your Documents and add these links, but once you've done that, you'll have the link to these records right within each item, functioning much like it did in the direct-attachment days.
In regard to your request about moving linkages, you're quite right in your suspicion that it's not at all trivial to add such a thing, because you're not moving just linkages, there are permissions issues, different encryption keys for different vaults, it's quite a challenge. Now that 1Password 7 for Mac and Windows is out the door, we may be able to devote some time to refining this feature, but I couldn't begin to give you any idea of what possibilities there are here or any kind of timeline. But thank you for sharing your use-case with us; I'll share it with our developers.
ETA: This post mirrors a support request #ZDD-51896-683
Can we make a request of you? Please don't do this: we're here to answer your questions or help you solve problems, but please choose a support channel and stick with it for the duration of the issue. There's an old saying that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," but in our case, for fairness' sake we answer user requests/issues in the order they're received, with few exceptions, and when we have to search for and coordinate responses to multiple identical requests across multiple points of contact and multiple coworkers, it slows down, not speeds up, the support times for everyone, including you. Thanks.
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Thanks for your reply ...
The links/files were created as part of the conversion. The items list 'imported attachment(s)' but it's a document/file. I just can't copy them to a different vault and keep the links/attachments intact without a lot of manual work, so I stopped doing it.
As far as the copy from one vault to another is concerned, we could offer a simplified version that creates new documents in the destination vault for each referenced item with a message similar to the one I saw during the conversion that it's doing that in case anybody cares to optimize any multiple references. I believe that multiple references to a single file will not be the common case, but will be the rare case at least initially.
Does 1P retain links back to the referencing items in documents? I don't see them listed when I look at a document. But they were clever enough to append the name of the referencing item to the document name, which works for one:one references.
I was wondering about finding all the references to a document, but it looks like we can copy the UUID of the document (if we enable that feature in advanced settings) and then search for it to find all the references to a document.
-David
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@dmkahn - indeed, if you turn on
Copy UUIDin Preferences > Advanced, you can search for references to it. That's the best way to do this.Does 1P retain links back to the referencing items in documents?
No, but you can create them, so that they are in effect two-way (from Document --> Login (or other) record and from Login --> Document). Hope that helps.
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I've just run into this problem (not fun when moving 100s of items!) and have to say that I'm pretty surprised that moving references properly between vaults has not yet been addressed. This problem has apparently been around since 2016. I understand that technical complications could require the application to ask the user for guidance in non-trivial ways. But it also seems clear that >99% of use cases will be trivial, i.e. referenced documents are only referenced at most once each and should be copied/moved, too.
For example, it should be easily possible to rewrite references (UUIDs) in copied/moved items if the referenced item is also being moved / copied. This is currently not happening, and I don't see any good reason why it shouldn't. It would already substantially reduce work associated with relinking documents. The application could also list items that may need to be added to the operation to preserve references. Or, and that would seem to be exceptionally rare, suggest copying instead of moving if other references in the source vault need to be maintained.
I don't know how exactly UUIDs are generated in your case, but if they are indeed 128-bit and generated well (randomly and uniformly), then reusing them in the destination vault should be safe. We would probably have to wait for the heat death of the universe before seeing a collision, and even that almost impossible case could be handled easily by just transparently regenerating the affected UUID(s) in the source vault.
Btw., one really annoying problem right now is that one cannot even search for items that have references. If I query for "Number of attachments is greater than 0", then I get nothing. This may be a bug and makes it hard to find items that (currently) need manual relinking of documents after copying/moving.
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@Markus73 - Sorry for the trouble and time-consuming issue you had. At this point, I'm not sure there's much to be done about it, other than to pass along your feedback to the developers for consideration in future releases, but I did want to mention that if you're getting a zero result for searches on "Number of attachments is greater than 0," you may want to check that you're not searching in All Vaults (or, obviously, in a 1password.com vault), because search of that nature requires you be in a single vault. Hope that helps! :)
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@Lars If I understand you correctly, "Number of attachments" only makes sense in "traditional" vaults, i.e. outside of the 1Password cloud. I mistakenly believed it extends to the concept of "number of references" after importing. It's surprising that there doesn't seem to be any equivalent query.
Anyway, I have at least found a workaround for freshly imported attachments: switch queries to "search all fields" and then look for "imported attachment". This works across all vaults. But beware, once you move and relink items + documents, the "imported attachment" field label for this "related item" will change and hence cause the referencing item to not show up in that query anymore.
A new approach to referencing items
I've just thought about more user-friendly ways to create graph-like reference structures. Instead of using a (typically invisible) single UUID as reference, why not exploit the already implemented tagging functionality? That way an item can reference many other items at once in an extensible way.
If a user adds a new attachment (document) to a note, the application could prompt the user to enter the referencing tag(s) that should be added to both the new document item and to the reference field (interpreted as a logical conjunction there). It could automatically add a fresh, possibly universally unique tag for this new document and the reference, which the user could remove with a single backspace if they don't need it or if they want to rename it.
Besides being trivial to implement within the existing infrastructure, the big advantage here is that it avoids degenerate behavior for certain operations. E.g. right now I cannot move an item from one vault to another and then back again without losing information (references). This is surprising, and not in a good way. The tag-based approach also greatly increases flexibility: users can add or remove referenced items without having to update any of the referencing items by simply tagging them accordingly.
Finding dangling references, i.e. reference fields (conjunctions of tags) that don't have corresponding items within the same vault, could be added as a search feature to help people identify items that need to be moved or copied between vaults.
I'm pretty sure the above feature would capture pretty much all of my (power user) use cases, is conceptually trivial, doesn't misbehave in ways that users would find difficult to understand, and can rely on existing infrastructure.
Could the developers please consider this approach?
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If I understand you correctly, "Number of attachments" only makes sense in "traditional" vaults, i.e. outside of the 1Password cloud. I mistakenly believed it extends to the concept of "number of references" after importing. It's surprising that there doesn't seem to be any equivalent query.
@Markus73: That's correct: there are no attachments with 1Password.com accounts, but I do agree it would be nice if the app had a way to quickly find linked items. I'll bring this up with the team, and perhaps we can do something like that in a future version.
ref: apple-1652
Anyway, I have at least found a workaround for freshly imported attachments: switch queries to "search all fields" and then look for "imported attachment". This works across all vaults. But beware, once you move and relink items + documents, the "imported attachment" field label for this "related item" will change and hence cause the referencing item to not show up in that query anymore.
As you mention, that's a good workaround in some cases, but not for all. We'll see what we can do to help with this.
A new approach to referencing items
I've just thought about more user-friendly ways to create graph-like reference structures. Instead of using a (typically invisible) single UUID as reference, why not exploit the already implemented tagging functionality? That way an item can reference many other items at once in an extensible way.
If a user adds a new attachment (document) to a note, the application could prompt the user to enter the referencing tag(s) that should be added to both the new document item and to the reference field (interpreted as a logical conjunction there). It could automatically add a fresh, possibly universally unique tag for this new document and the reference, which the user could remove with a single backspace if they don't need it or if they want to rename it.
Besides being trivial to implement within the existing infrastructure, the big advantage here is that it avoids degenerate behavior for certain operations. E.g. right now I cannot move an item from one vault to another and then back again without losing information (references). This is surprising, and not in a good way. The tag-based approach also greatly increases flexibility: users can add or remove referenced items without having to update any of the referencing items by simply tagging them accordingly.Those are really interesting ideas, and it's something we can consider...but I think that's a misuse of tags. Certainly if you or others want to tag items yourself that's fine, but I think that tags should remain up to the user if possible.
Finding dangling references, i.e. reference fields (conjunctions of tags) that don't have corresponding items within the same vault, could be added as a search feature to help people identify items that need to be moved or copied between vaults.
I'm pretty sure the above feature would capture pretty much all of my (power user) use cases, is conceptually trivial, doesn't misbehave in ways that users would find difficult to understand, and can rely on existing infrastructure.
Could the developers please consider this approach?I appreciate that this would help your specific use case, and it's something we can consider, but we also need to take all other 1Password users into consideration. "Power user" features are nice for power users, but if we can make something that is more accessible to a wider range of users, I think that's an even bigger win. Thank you for your feedback on this! :)
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@brenty This is emphatically not a power user feature! What I meant to say is that even I as a power user would be perfectly well-served by this simple approach (IMHO, much simpler than the current implementation).
The suggested approach is completely consistent with already existing functionality and easy to understand for anyone who has ever worked with tags. The current approach is difficult to understand (try to explain UUIDs to the average user!) and simply broken. Moving items between vaults shouldn't break item relations in a way that requires manually fixing every single relation in a laborious and error-prone process.
While moving imported items to their intended new vaults in the cloud, I had to find, move, and reattach more than a hundred document items, each of which had to be picked out from a long list of often very similar sounding items. Should I ever want to move items to other vaults again, I'll have to redo all of that. The current solution is certainly not user-friendly.
I agree that tags are up to the user. What I described is that when attaching a new document, the application could prompt the user to provide tags identifying this relation. The prompt could provide an option for adding a fresh, unique tag. The user could add their own tag(s) that capture related items.
Let me give you a practical example: most members of my family have at least two passports (some even three!). I usually scan them in while keeping old passports around. I have a passport item with the latest info that currently has a relationship for each passport I have ever received for this country and person. If I move this passport item to, say, a "Travel" vault, I will have to manually fix the now broken relationship for every single passport ever attached by first finding and moving the associated document from the source vault and then picking it out from the list of all document items in the destination vault. A nightmare!
If, instead, I could just specify in a relation field that all items tagged as, for example, "Markus, Passport, USA" should be related to the given passport item, a simple mouse click on the relation field would perform a query for items having these tags and thus show me everything I may need to move. If I ever want to add a renewed passport, I just add the document item and tag it. The relation field in the passport item would then capture it without any change.
Even more importantly, moving just the passport item to a new vault does not break relations as with the current approach. I can always easily find the related documents with a tag search across all vaults. Moving them later is going to work just as intended: they'll be captured by the tags in the relation field.
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Is there anything preventing your developers from adding an "Image" field data type, in addition to the types (Text, URL, email, address...) that you have already? Then a field could be set as Image and a picture of a Driver's License (say) could be part of the record associated with a Driver's License. No need for complex links. The image could be deleted or replaced as required. The image field would be one of the attributes of the Item record, and go wherever the record went. I can imagine some uses for multiple image fields - for example, associated with my credit card might be a scan of the card itself, plus a pdf of the insurance terms associated with the card.
Links to documents should be reserved for more complex relationships; I think most end users consider an image of a credit card or a driver's license to be another piece of information that comprises the item, like a name, #, or date - not a separate item.
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@ddhawk: Local vaults work the way you're describing with regard to attachments, and we created Documents for 1Password.com because of the many downsides and limitations of the old way. To name a few:
- File size limit to maintain efficiency (especially for sync, data usage, and storage)
- Having to create another item just to save a file in 1Password
- File attachments downloaded automatically to all devices
- Necessary to re-add the file in order to associate it with a different item
With all of that baggage out fo the way and a lot more flexibility overall, we're evaluating other ways of integrating Documents into 1Password users' workflows, so thanks for the feedback. :)
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@Markus73: Well, you really make it sound like a power user feature. If nothing else, it would seem that way to most 1Password users because it would be a different way to think of tags, in addition to their current function. We're in agreement that it would be nice to have a better UI for linking and have 1Password assist more when moving data between vaults. I just don't think that muddying tags is the way to do it. The core of the idea is a good one though, and we're aiming for the same thing. Thanks for sharing! :)
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Hi AgileBits,
Long-time 1password user here (and convert to 1password.com family for my wife and I). We both love your product. I'd just like to add one more voice to this request: my wife and I have a burgeoning dataset in our individual and shared vaults, and moving large numbers of items between vaults, often with inter-links, is something we would very much like. First-class support, not a workaround as suggested here.
If this message doesn't result in a ++ to this feature request, let me know what I should do to do my part in helping up-prioritising this effort.
Thanks,
Ifty.0 -
Thank you for sharing your feedback as well :)
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