How to manually back up vaults stored with 1password?

marcelb

Hello support,

With 1password6 I used to store the vaults on Dropbox, and then have my Mac back up the vault data from my dropbox folder, in case Dropbox accidentally loses my data.

Now with 1password7 I want to achieve the same. In case AgileBits loses my data or have some sort of outage/problems, I want to have the vault data somewhere on my backup drives still to recover from.

How can I do this?

Cheers,
Marcel

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1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

Lars

Welcome to the forum, @marcelb! If you've transitioned from local (standalone) data to a 1password.com account, your data is already in two places: the 1password.com servers (we use Amazon AWS as our host; they are multiply redundant, so the chance of actual data outage is very small) and your own device. Since version 6 of 1Password for Mac, if you're using a 1password.com account there is a local cache of your data within 1Password itself. That's how you can use 1Password on your Mac at times when you don't have an internet connection.

marcelb

Hi @Lars, thanks for your reply. Good to hear, but but data outage is just one thing. (Accidental) deletion or data corruption that quickly spreads over different devices is another, having versioned backups (Time Machine or similar) would be ideal. That local cache on my Mac, where is it exactly?

Lars

@marcelb it's the internal database that 1Password for Mac uses. The 1password.com servers allow you (via a browser) to restore items on a fine-grained, individual level. If you sign into your 1password.com account in a browser, choose an item you've made edits to since creating or importing it initially, and you'll see "View Item History" (if you don't see that, there have been no changes made to the record since it was created/imported):

Clicking the View Item History button will reveal a pop-up that allows you to view - and restore to - any previous state of the data for that individual record.

Anyone with a 1password.com account can - at any time, if they so choose - create within 1Password for Mac a local vault, and copy (or move) any data they wish to it. This is how we answer "what if you go out of business tomorrow" questions: you always have a copy of your data which can be transferred to local vaults at any time.

marcelb

Thanks, that's a nice feature. The web UI looks good in general.

Should restoring "~/Library/Containers/com.agilebits.onepassword7", "~/Library/Preferences/com.agilebits.onepassword7.plist" and "~/Library/Application Support/1Password 4" (why 4 btw? :)) give me back the last local state of the app? This would allow me to rely on restoring Time Machine backups (disabling internet connection to prevent sync)

marcelb

Asking because creating local vaults is great but can't be automated

Lars

@marcelb - anything labeled 1Password 4 is from pre-version 7. The reason it's "4" is because that was the last major change in format/location of 1Password data. We kept the library folders the same because many users had multiple devices with different versions which would've required altering the setup on all devices and b) most people don't mess with Library folder contents anyway. But 1Password 7 for Mac represents an entirely new approach -- data is NOT stored in ~/Library/Application Support/1Password 4 any longer, it's now in Group Containers. Specifically: ~/Library/Group Containers/2BUA8C4S2C.com.agilebits/Library/Application Support/1Password/Data/ -- that'd be the one you want to restore in Time Machine or SuperDuper or whatever you have. Note that this would only be the case until the next time you unlock 1Password 7 for Mac -- first thing it will do is hit our servers and all of that old data will be updated to whatever the server's record is. In the case you're supposing, however, if we were the ones who'd gone all wonky, you'd probably want to stay offline until you could transfer your data from 1password.com account vaults into local vaults. I want to stress, again, the likelihood of this happening is as near zero as imaginable: we don't actually have access to your data; only the encrypted version, and Amazon AWS has a remarkably robust disaster recovery plan. But what I've said above is accurate/will work as well.

marcelb

But that's great, that's exactly what I want to be able to do. More out of principle that it should be possible, than that it's likely I ever need it. Thanks for the great support @Lars!

Lars

@marcelb - you're quite welcome! Glad we were able to arrive at a solution that works for you. :)