Can't delete Primary Vault

BasilFawlty

I was trying to follow the "migration" instructions to delete the primary vault (since it appears to be a duplicate of Personal vault) but I get error message "Primary vault cannot be deleted." Now what?

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

rudy

@BasilFawlty,

What version of 1Password are you running? Because it shouldn't let you attempt to delete the primary vault until you've deleted all those other on my mac and on dropbox vaults.

BasilFawlty

What version of 1Password are you running? Because it shouldn't let you attempt to delete the primary vault until you've deleted all those other on my mac and on dropbox vaults.

I have now deleted all the on my mac and all on dropbox vaults except the Primary vault on Dropbox because it still won't let me. But all the other vaults are deleted. Version 7.2.1

Lars

@BasilFawlty - sorry for the trouble. Please try opening Preferences > Advanced and UN-checking the box marked "Allow creation of vaults outside 1Password accounts." See if that makes any difference.

BasilFawlty

sorry for the trouble. Please try opening Preferences > Advanced and UN-checking the box marked "Allow creation of vaults outside 1Password accounts." See if that makes any difference.

That did the trick. Thanks.

Lars

@BasilFawlty - you're quite welcome. Enjoy your trial of 1password.com! Let us know if you have any questions.

landesjm

This thread was very helpful, allowing me to delete the old Primary vault.
thanks
jml

Lars

@landesjm - glad it helped! Let us know if you need assistance with anything else. :)

danshumaker

I seem to be in a similar bind as @BasilFawlty, except 1password is saying "You have several vaults outside of your 1Password accounts. They must be deleted before you disable this feature", in the Preferences -> Advanced -> Local Vaults checkbox help. However, all three old vaults that have been migrated to my 1password.com account are now empty and not syncing to dropbox anymore and I'm not sure what else I can do to remove them. To be clear, the Vault -> Delete Vault, menu option is greyed out and the Checkbox suggested by Lars is also greyed out. Any ideas on how I can remove the old empty vaults? Thank you.

Lars

@danshumaker - sorry for the trouble! That checkbox will only work if you have only the single Primary standalone vault. If you've created other secondary standalone vaults, you will need to remove them individually first. To do that, use the vault menu to switch to each one of the secondary vaults, then click Vaults > Switch to Vault > (name) > Delete Vault. Once you're down to just the single Primary vault, you can use either method to remove it. Hope that helps! :)

danshumaker

@Lars Many thanks! That did the trick! :) :) :) :)

Lars

@danshumaker - glad I was able to help! :)

sdes

I too had the same issue, it seem the "help" at https://support.1password.com/migrate-1password-account/ could do with updating to include this rather un-obvious work around to deleting the old Primary / Dropbox Vault. I would never in 100 yrs have worked out that the option under advanced preferences was what needed to be unchecked to enable deletion...

Lars

@sdes - glad to hear you were able to get the vaults deleted, though I'm not sure why you put "help" in quotes, or what you mean regarding the information offered at that link. What I wrote above is that to delete the vault, you need to delete secondary standalone vaults first, then delete the Primary vault (if you have multiple vaults). And at the "migrate" link you mention, it says:

and then at the bottom, says: "If you can’t remove the old Primary vault, remove all other standalone vaults and try again." It's not worded exactly the same, but that's the same information.

sdes

When I put "help" in inverted commas, it was because I was not finding the support email or the website very helpful.

Having written two email help requests, I got two robot auto-responses saying.

"Hey there! 👋

Thanks for taking the time to contact us. 😊

My human friends have received your message and are working as quickly as possible to get back to you. We know you rely on 1Password and just want to resolve things and get on with your life. We totally get it. So we have some links below that might get you up and running without having to wait."

Four days on (albeit part of it weekend) and the "human friends" have not responded.

There were a series of links that were also not of help, and one that then took me to the page previously quoted where I found the migration instruction:

"To remove your old Primary vault, choose Vault menu > Switch to Vault > Primary. Then choose Vault menu > Delete Vault."

Doing that I simply got the dialogue "Primary Vault cannot be deleted"

the advice to "If you can’t remove the old Primary vault, remove all other standalone vaults and try again." is clear if you have clarity on what a "standalone vault" is. Searching in the online help I could find nothing to define it, perhaps I didn't search in the right place, but I assumed it meant other vaults that were not part of my 1Password online account that I was attempting to migrate to. If that was a correct assumption, then there were no other "standalone" vaults, only the vault in the "1Password account", so I was following the correct procedure. If it's not a correct assumption, then can you explain what is meant by a "standalone vault", as I'm afraid I'm just a pretty confused end user without knowledge of the correct 1Password vault nomenclature.

There is even a two and a half minute help video about organising Vaults, which at no point mentions "standalone vaults"
https://youtu.be/8LWM5MkvvSs

So yes, sorry if the inverted commas cause offence, but I did not find the web nor email help as much help as I thought they should have been. I had imagined a clean and easy transfer from the old device based system to the "1Password account" based system was crucial/fundamental and I don't think users should really need to start searching the Forum pages to do that - I'm probably wrong, but just my POV. I've probably made lmore confusing for myself by being a 1P user over several years on multiple OSs (Win10, iOS & OSX) when 1P was at different releases on differnt platforms.

Ben

Hi everyone.

We've recently become aware of an issue where the Primary vault can currently only be deleted by selecting 1Password > Preferences > Advanced > an uncheck the option to allow creation of vaults outside 1Password accounts.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Development is aware of this issue and we're hoping for a fix soon.

Ben

Lars

@sdes - thanks for being a 1Password user over multiple years and platforms. And yes, things are (somewhat) different from platform to platform, but I'm sorry for the confusion over terminology. You are correct that "standalone vaults" means vaults created locally on your own device, rather than in a 1password.com account. There are currently two ways to use 1Password:

With a 1Password account:

• You sign up for an account at the main 1Password  sign-up page.
• Your subscription includes the 1Password apps across all platforms, with all updates and upgrades for as long as your account is active.
• Once you sign in to your account in 1Password on a new device, all of your data is instantly available - no need to set up third-party sync.

As a standalone product:

• You purchase licenses for each platform separately.
• These licenses include all in-version updates, but a major version upgrade (such as 1Password 7) may require a paid upgrade.
• You create local 1Password vaults, and if you like, choose how to sync your data. You can set up sync using a third party service (like Dropbox or iCloud.) If you do not set up sync, your data will remain only on your device.

1Password accounts also include access to your data via a web browser, and per-item backups so you always have a safe copy of your data off of your devices, and can roll back to a previous version of an item if a change is accidentally made.

It's not so much that "inverted commas cause offence" as it is recognizing that (as you put it) two of the days you were waiting were over a weekend, and that we have many other users waiting for support and we answer requests in the order we receive them, as quickly as possible. To that end, you can help by not posting the same thing to multiple places, multiple times. When we have to stop and coordinate multiple replies to the same question/issue from the same person among several of use across multiple points of contact, it can cause confusion and will definitely slow the support times for everyone, including you.

tomoy

Hi, I'm on v6.8.9 and have run into this issue where I can't remove the Primary Vault. It's a local file. I did have a Secondary Vault, but I succeeded in removing it according to documentation. It seems I have two failure points. The 1Password Menu has an item for Delete Vault, but it is grayed-out. Probably related to that (?) is that in Preferences > Advanced: the option untick the box to "Allow creation of vaults outside of 1password accounts" is grayed out, with no elaboration on why. Ooh, 3rdly, the option in the Help Menu > Troubleshooting > Reset all 1password data is grayed out too.

I've run the Troubleshooting Utility v5.0.10, repaired permissions, repaired attributes, reset launch services. So far no luck clearing out the Primary Vault Data. Any further ideas appreciated!

--- Okay, update. I found out how to Reset all 1password data. I had to Lock the current vault first from the 1password menu. That did the trick and I can start over now. Nevermind!

ag_ana

Thank you for the update @tomoy! I am happy to hear that you managed to get this sorted out :)