Should husband and I share a single private vault?

reebs26

Hi, I'm sorry if this has been answered. I looked through tons of questions, but don't feel confident that I've got the right answer.

My business partner and I have both used Mac licenses for years. We took the plunge this year and got a family subscription to use all together with his wife, my husband, and my dad. My business partner is the manager of the account, but I'm sure he'd be fine adding me as a manager, too. He has an a private vault, his wife has one, I have one, and I've just set up one for my husband and my dad. There are currently 3 shared vaults.

In my private vault, I have 500+ logins. I got my husband's account going tonight and got his passwords imported from Chrome. (He doesn't have too many.) I've also gotten my dad set up, and I just need to get his hand-written logins entered into 1password.

So here's where I'm getting confused. I went to share my private vault with my husband, but it looks like that is not an option. I can only assume it won't be possible for him to share his private vault with me, either. Same for my dad.

My husband and I both need access to each other's passwords. I need access to all my dad's passwords, and my dad needs access to a handful of my passwords (which I can put into one of the three shared vaults we already have set up within the account).

QUESTIONS:
1. Should my husband and I have a single private vault together? If not, how should we set it up?
2. How can my dad give me access to all his passwords? Should we create a shared vault that's just shared between my dad and me, and then he just keep his private vault empty?

Thank you!

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1Password Version: 6.8.9
Extension Version: 4.7.2.90
OS Version: OS X 10.11.6
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Referrer: forum-search:Should husband and I share a single vault?

Bill_Lee

1. I don't think you can share your Private vault, because it your Private (non-shareable) vault. The simple fix is to make a new Vault that only you and your husband share. Your own Private vault can be empty, but it can still contain information that you truly don't need to share with your husband. Just create a new Vault in your macOS 1Password7 app and drag all the passwords from your Private Vault into this new vault. Right-click on your new Vault name and select Manage Access... in the pop-up menu. Click in the checkbox next to your husband's name and click on the Confirm button. This will allow you to share all those moved Passwords in that Vault with your husband and keep these in sync if either of you has to change a Password one day.

2. You pretty much answered your own question 1 with your question 2. Yes, create a new vault and follow the steps in my answer to 1. above, but give access to your dad. If he is running macOS he can just drag all the Passwords he wants to share once you share that Vault with him. He can maintain his own Private Vault for the stuff he wants to keep private.

If you need to give some people full administrator access to a Vault, or to make it read-only (say for children or people who might accidentally delete Passwords), you need to log into the Family login website and make the changes there as you can't do it inside the macOS app. There might be some Passwords that need to be shared with both husband and dad: it might be easiest to make another Vault that the whole family has access to instead of giving access to everyone for everything. The All Vaults selection makes it mostly transparent as to where a Password is actually stored.

BHF

1. I'm a newbie, so please take this FWIW. We have a new Families license, with accounts for my wife and me. We plan on adding accounts for our daughters, aged 18 and 15. As in your case, my wife and I need to share each other's passwords. Our approach, so far, is to create multiple shared vaults (Financial, Medical, Education, Travel, etc.) for our various logins. In the cases where we both have accounts for the same site, such as at a bank, we create two logins: N Main Street Bank and C Main Street Bank, using our initials to distinguish one from the other.
2. Your dad could create a new shared vault that he shares just with you or with you and your husband, if that's appropriate. He would store any passwords he needs to share with you in that new vault; and, of course, you would put any passwords he needs access to in that vault. (Both my and my wife's Private Vault is empty, BTW.)

Since we plan on using the vault named Shared for items the whole family needs (Netflix account, WiFi passwords), we don't plan on putting much else in it. Your situation, with five users, might actually have an empty Shared vault.

Good luck!
--Nick

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Version Information

1Password 7
Version 7.0.6 (70006000)
AgileBits Store

1Password Chrome Extension Version 4.7.2.90

macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.5

Sync version: Confused about this...

Ben

Hi folks,

This is one of those questions that doesn’t necessarily have a right or wrong answer. There are a couple of options, and which one may suit you best will depend on your situation. Before we get started I would like to mention a couple of things:

• I recommend using extreme caution in storing your personal data in a membership controlled by someone outside of your family. As far as 1Password is concerned the membership belongs to whomever is paying for it, and it is theirs to do with as they wish (including deleting it).
• 1Password Families memberships are not intended for business use. 1Password Business is the more appropriate solution for that, and it includes a 1Password Families membership for each person who is part of the 1Password Business membership. Please reach out to our business team at business@1password.com to discuss further.
• Please also note that with 1Password Families anyone who is a Family Organizer can grant themselves access to any shared vaults (anything that isn’t a Private / Personal vault). This is one reason 1Password Families is not an appropriate solution for non-family usage. In this scenario your business partner could give himself access to the passwords you and your Dad are sharing.

Now, to your questions. The only way to “share” a Private / Personal vault is to log in to 1Password using the same credentials. Otherwise these vaults are private to the individual they are for and cannot be shared, by design. So sharing the same 1Password credentials, and essentially being the same person as far as 1Password is concerned, may be one solution. Consider that if you and your husband are using the same account, and your father shares all of his data with you, your husband will also have access to all of your father’s data. So the other solution would be to continue using separate accounts, but to not store any data in the Private / Personal vaults, instead using a vault (or multiple) that is shared between the two of you. If you go that route you may want to adjust the settings in 1Password > Preferences > All Vaults (uncheck Private / Personal, and set an appropriate default vault for saving).

I typically recommend keeping separate accounts. Family situations can be dynamic and having separate accounts gives you the most flexibility. Business situations even more so.

I hope that helps!

Ben

ref: ENC-95933-249

reebs26

Thank you, Ben, for your response. (Thanks, too, Bill & BHF!)

Perhaps TMI, but my business partner and I have been working together for 26 years and have, until we started using 1password a few years ago, pretty much shared the exact same password for every personal account we had. (Hence the need for 1password!!) Our lives are extremely intertwined personally (powers of attorney, etc.) and we probably have 5 passwords/logins in total that we use for business purposes. That said, you raise countless good points.

Questions:
1. You pointed out that account holders are free to an delete account if they so desired. Are there any backups that could be accessed after the fact if the primary account holder deletes the account?
2. Can a family organizer ever have access to your private vault?
3. And finally, if you have separate accounts, is it easy to search within all of them at the same time without having to log in to them separately? (Like, if I were to set up my own 1password family account with my husband and my dad, but also wanted to keep access to various vaults in my business partner's family account, would I be able to search for, say, "American Airlines" and find all the passwords across all the accounts and vaults that I had access to?)

Thank you!

Ben

@reebs26,

Perhaps TMI, but my business partner and I have been working together for 26 years and have, until we started using 1password a few years ago, pretty much shared the exact same password for every personal account we had. (Hence the need for 1password!!) Our lives are extremely intertwined personally (powers of attorney, etc.) and we probably have 5 passwords/logins in total that we use for business purposes.

Not TMI at all, and I thank you for sharing your perspective. Most folks of course would not be able to say the same, which is one reason we don’t recommend such a setup. :)

1. You pointed out that account holders are free to an delete account if they so desired. Are there any backups that could be accessed after the fact if the primary account holder deletes the account?

At the moment: if there were we wouldn’t restore them. If the account holder decided to delete the account that would be their choice to make and we wouldn’t reverse that decision.

That said we are working on offline backups (stored on customer’s devices). It is very likely that an offline backup would allow you access to data that is part of an account that has been deleted. We’ll know more as that feature is fleshed out.

2. Can a family organizer ever have access to your private vault?

There is no mechanism in 1Password that would allow them to do so, no. Shared vaults only.

That said if they also have access to your email account, in addition to being an organizer, they could put your account through recovery and gain access that way.

3. And finally, if you have separate accounts, is it easy to search within all of them at the same time without having to log in to them separately? (Like, if I were to set up my own 1password family account with my husband and my dad, but also wanted to keep access to various vaults in my business partner's family account, would I be able to search for, say, "American Airlines" and find all the passwords across all the accounts and vaults that I had access to?)

Very easy through the use of the native 1Password apps (1Password for Mac, 1Password for Windows, etc). Each device I have 1Password on is signed into 5 or so different accounts which allows me to easily access all of my 1Password data on each of those devices. It is very possible, and quite common, to have more than one 1Password account added to your 1Password apps.

Ben

reebs26

You are SO HELPFUL! Can you guys send a triage team over to Mint.com?! They need some customer service help tout suite! But seriously, I really appreciate your feedback on all my questions.

Ben

Thanks for the kind words. Happy to help. :)

Ben

reebs26

Ben—Just above in #3, it sounds like I might could have access to both my private vault and my husband's private vault on my various devices without logging in and out. Is that true?

Ben

@reebs26,

Not exactly, no, sorry for any confusion. You cannot sign into multiple accounts from within the same membership at the same time. In #3 I was speaking about accessing multiple of your own accounts across various memberships, not accessing multiple accounts owned by different people within one membership.

Ben

reebs26

Thank you! So I think I'm going to move all of my husband's passwords into my private account (within a shared family vault). Could you tell me the process for doing that (or just direct me to the right place to find those instructions)? Thank you!

Ben

You can learn about how to move items between vaults here:

Move items between vaults | 1Password

I hope that helps!

Ben