Can I recover an accidentally deleted vault?

mkrell

Hello. A team member accidentally deleted a vault at my request. Is there a way for me to recover it? I'm using 1Password online for teams and am an administrator

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mkrell

I got a hold of 1Password rep, he said that there is no way to recover old vaults. Fortunately, the vault was a conversion from a Dropbox stored .opvault format to 1PasswordOnline, so we just restored it from our old system.

But I'm concerned; if there's no way to recover deleted vaults, is there a way to make your own backups of the vault? Like, can you export the vaults to .opvault again?

Ben

Hi @mkrell,

There isn’t currently a native solution for vault backups. Item backups: yes. An item history is kept. But if you delete the entire vault... no. That is something we’re looking into. The best you could do at this point would be an export, but that would be unencrypted. Alternatively, you could set up a computer with a standalone vault for each membership vault, and periodically manually empty the standalone vault’s contents and copy the contents over from the membership vault. Each of those standalone vaults could also be set up to Folder Sync out to an opvault, if desired.

Ben

mkrell

@Ben that's not a bad solution, thanks. One suggestion my boss was thinking was export it unencrypted to an encrypted thumb drive with an encrypted .dmg stored on it. I'll check out the standalone idea. Thanks.

AGAlumB

That's totally doable. diskutil is really useful. :)

chrish23

This is a huge omission and vulnerability to disaster if there is no way to recover an accidentally deleted vault. Compounding matters, 1Password backup options are extremely limited and require kind of funky band aid workarounds at best. Please address this for the sake of your customers data. Not all passwords can be reset if lost.

wavesound

Yeah, I have to agree. This seems like a big design oversight. I can recover lost individual items within a vault, but a vault is lost forever?

It’s also very difficult to backup vaults since you have to go one-by-one...and we have a lot of vaults.

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/100246/batch-export-multiple-vaults#latest

AGAlumB

We're not talking about passwords that have been "lost" though, but rather data that has been intentionally deleted. There are multiple steps necessary to delete a vault, so I think it's reasonable to expect that if you go out of your way to do so it's intentional, and not a "vulnerability" or "oversight", except with regard to human frailty. On the other hand, we regularly get requests from users to make it easier to delete data permanently. That said, we would like to improve the UI for backup/restore, etc. (though, again, backup happens automatically, so the "one-by-one" comment is not accurate), and these are all things we can take into account as we continue building the apps and service. Just keep in mind that no matter what we end up doing, we cannot stop you from destroying your data should you choose to actively do that.

wavesound

That said, we would like to improve the UI for backup/restore, etc. (though, again, backup happens automatically, so the "one-by-one" comment is not accurate), and these are all things we can take into account as we continue building the apps and service.

@brenty, I am referring the process of manually backing up vaults by exporting them from 1Password.com. If that process has improved, then I would be very happy.

Right now, in order to take an offline backup of our vaults, I have to go to each of our many vaults and manually export them to our encrypted storage devices...it stinks.

AGAlumB

I am referring the process of manually backing up vaults by exporting them from 1Password.com. If that process has improved, then I would be very happy.

@wavesound: That's not backup; it's export. The purpose of that is to move data out of 1Password and into another app. I agree completely that export could and should be improved, but it's not going to be designed around a "backup" use case since exports need to be unencrypted in order for software to read them, and storing an unencrypted "backup" of data you're trying to secure is anathema.

Right now, in order to take an offline backup of our vaults, I have to go to each of our many vaults and manually export them to our encrypted storage devices...it stinks.

An "offline" backup is only going to be useful with a way to restore from it, so that's another task for us entirely. I know that's something you're passionate about, but please refrain from hijacking other people's only peripherally related discussions for your own purposes.

dmdunn

brenty. Your comment above says: "There are multiple steps necessary to delete a vault, so I think it's reasonable to expect that if you go out of your way to do so it's intentional, and not a "vulnerability" or "oversight", except with regard to human frailty." I'm your distressed example of human frailty. I wasn't even taking "steps" this morning, but as I was browsing the Home page, my wife's vault disappeared. I didn't intend to click any button, let alone confirm an intention; the vault just went away. Clearly something happened that I was party to, but only three shared items from her vault remain visible. When I click on the Vaults link in the right sidebar, I see her vault name, the update and creation date, and 86 items (as expected). You may be saving my marriage, if not my self-esteem, if you can help us get at those 83 additional records from my wife's late vault. Help please. David

Ben

Hi @dmdunn

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having.

Clearly something happened that I was party to

I'm not sure it is a fair assumption that anything you did caused the situation. If as you say you were just browsing the homepage I don't see how you could've deleted a vault. In any event, to investigate this situation further, we'd need to move this conversation to email. Because this is a public forum we're unable to discuss (or even look up) the details of anyone's account here. We'd be happy to help you figure out what happened though if we can, so please drop us an email to support@1password.com.

Ben