Transferring 1Password from iMac

Hi @Michael Cunnington‌

I'll start off with you can definitely transfer 1Password across.

If you're happy with the idea of Apple's Migration Assistant (located in /Applications/Utilities) then that's certainly one route. I've never used it myself but from a bit of brief reading just now it should allow you to migrate your entire user profile and applications fairly easily. Possibly the simplest route would be either a Time Machine backup if you have that or if both machines can be connected to the same router you can run Migration Assistant on both and do it that way.

If you're within easy distance of an Apple store and have a car you may find you could even take both machines to them and have Apple help you (phone first though).

If you go down the route of Migration Assistant you should find that both your data and your copy of 1Password 3 are transferred. You can probably even keep running just 1Password 3 if you want although there are plenty of reasons to be running the latest version (at least I think so).

There is one small gotcha with Yosemite (which is what I suspect your brand new machine will come with). I don't know if it applies to 1Password 3 but why take the chance? Don't worry, it's nothing dreadful. If you do upgrade to 1Password 5 then I'd recommend dragging your copy of the 1Password 3 application (just the program in Applications) to your Trash, then downloading 1Password 5. Why? Yosemite has this bug where it gets confused over which copy of a program it should launch. You won't need the actual 1Password 3 program anyway, all that matters is your data which is safely stored in your Library folder which we haven't touched.

When you launch 1Password 5 for the very first time it realises it hasn't been used before and it will go look in the standard location that 1Password 3 and 1Password 4 stored their data and if it finds it 1Password will import it. So after a welcome page you should be asked for your Master Password. You enter that and 1Password 5 will import your 1Password 3 keychain into its database.

Since joining AgileBits I've trashed so many copies of my 1Password (for testing purposes) that it feels like second nature to import from a backup or have it look in old locations. That's why I'm confident that you shouldn't have any problems in this respect.

If you have any questions though or I haven't answered anything in enough detail for you please just post back here and we'll see what we can do :smile:

Enjoy that new iMac, you'll find it flies compared to your old one.

Hi @Michael Cunnington‌

In terms of downloading a copy of 1Password, which you can do for the various versions on our download page, all the downloads are full copies of the application. So you won't have to worry about if you've downloaded an update file or the full thing - all the links will download a zipped copy of the full application and OS X knows how to handle zip files straight out of the box.

I think as long as the copy of 1Password 3 is in your Trash it won't interfere with the new version. You just don't want it anywhere OS X thinks is a reasonable place for an Application to be. If you don't empty your Trash you also know it can be retrieved.

Now in terms of licences, a 1Password 3 licence won't allow you to run 1Password 4 or 5 but using your 1Password 3 licence you will be eligible for a discounted price for a 1Password 5 licence. You don't have to worry about that straight away though as you get a 30 day trial with 1Password which will probably cover whatever period you'll be offline for. As you can deduce from that, you can download and run the new version prior to obtaining the new licence.

Given how you're feeling about transitioning over to a new machine I'd be loathe to suggest a manual transfer of only the files you feel are important. It's what I do but I'm quite comfortable about delving around the Application Support and Containers folders in the ~/Library folder. I'm actually in the process of doing this right now as I'm also moving from an older machine to a lovely brand new MacBook Pro. I'd say the best thing to do is accept that will be some 'rubbish' transferred too and then yeah, delete the stuff you don't want to keep. If you wanted you could do that before you transfer everything, both are viable.

A general observation, if for some reason OS X determines it can't run an old program it will use a semi-transparent circle with a diagonal line to indicate it won't run. You'll also probably find a lot of the programs you used to use have much newer versions depending on what version of OS X you were running before (which if I've researched correctly is Snow Leopard).

If you have more questions post away :smile: