Migrating to Families - just not good enough

Hi @farmerron! Welcome to the forums and to 1Password for Families. Glad to hear you're giving it a try. :) I'm sorry things were rough from the start though. I'd love to start off a bit of a discussion about the things you've mentioned.

I have a five user license. I use both the iOS and Windows App. I use Dropbox and I use Chrome. I thought that "upgrading" to Families would make it easier to share my main Vault with my wife and get her onto 1Password too.... I was so wrong.

Sorry for the confusion here. Families isn't necessarily an upgrade, but more of an extension of the apps you use. We built it to make storing and accessing your passwords quick and easy from wherever you are. It was mainly to simplify the syncing model we had before, which was hard for some new folks to grasp. "Why do I need to sync things?" they would ask. We didn't want to cause more thinking there, we just wanted to help them jump right in to 1Password and start using it to make their life easier. But alas, we've caused more confusion here, somehow conveying the idea that Families is an upgrade.

To remedy this, I'm curious about why you saw this as an upgrade. I'd really appreciate you taking a moment to think about what led you to this conclusion so we can make improvements to that area of our marketing, setup process, or whatever it may be and prevent this from happening in the future.

I lose the simple elegance and speed of the Windows Application and the integration to Chrome (as well as IE when I need it). I'm forced to use the Beta version of your Modern app - which is seriously ugly, nowhere near as efficient and does not replicate the organisation of the vault.

That simplicity, elegance, and speed (which, thank you for saying that by the way) is making its way back. Developing browser integration for the new Windows app has been a huge challenge, and we're still working out the details there. I'm sorry to hear the design and vault organization is not working well for you, though. We'd love to gather some feedback about what specifically is a stumbling block. Feel free to post that here or email it to us if you prefer.

I lose the background sync of Dropbox - so no strong redundancy built in for offline secure data. Dropbox refreshes each time I have connectivity. Migration to Families moves!! all the data to an online cloud. What happens then.

I know what you mean, though I actually see this as a positive. Since Families isn't a completely new app, but rather a service that keeps your data in one convenient place, it's a replacement for traditional sync methods. Implementing a redundancy in something like Dropbox would be difficult because it's not optimized for the structure we created in Families. We built it from the ground up, which means there's a lot more flexibility than having a third-party service involved (many more possibilities). That being said, we've had a lot of requests for local backups for a sense of security. My favorite discussion about it is in the Teams forum, and I hope it sheds some light on the subject. :)

The best solution at the moment is to maintain two copies of the data manually. I personally don't do it because it's an unnecessary amount of maintenance, but if you manually copy your Families data to a local vault and back that up or sync it with Dropbox, you can have that redundancy. There's more on this in the discussion I mentioned.

So I installed 1Password for Windows 10, connected to my Dropbox vault - which took ages and then followed instructions to migrate to the Families system. I had both open. The App and my Families (in Chrome). I could see that the migration only happened while the App was active. Each time it timed out (set for 1 minute) the migration stopped!!!! In fact I have less items in Families than in my Vault (no attachments before anyone suggests this).

Ages is no fun. :( It should have taken a moment or two at the most. And a timeout... that shouldn't be happening at all. Is your internet connection pretty speedy? You definitely shouldn't have lost anything during the migration. Did you experience any errors during the import, such as the ones mentioned here?

AgileBits: Sorry guys you absolutely need to make this slicker. I have an existing investment in a 1Password App with a 5 user License. Nowhere in any of the abundant help and support articles do you address the how your existing your base is working.

There are definitely areas that can be improved, and we're doing our best to keep moving forward. :) We have a small team, so it's good to remember that. I'm glad the standard Windows app has been treating you so well in the meantime. I really hope you can hop back on board with Families at some point as well. Keep an eye out for newsletter updates from us and feel free to let us know if there's anything at all we can do to help.

@BrianE: Thanks for the feedback! We're considering different options going forward, but in general 1Password Teams will always have more granular, advanced features than 1Password Families since it's aimed at businesses primarily.