Is there a route back after the account trial

Hi @iwaddo,

I was part of the group that designed the current Document architecture. I'd be happy to talk about our thoughts there.

Our goal was "Better attachments than attachments in 1Password 5 for Mac." Those older attachments had some limitations that we really didn't like:

• They weren't downloaded on demand. This meant that your vault grew large quickly and made syncing slow across all of your devices. This lead to the low size limit of 5mb or so per file with old attachments.
• It wasn't possible to reference 1 file with multiple items
• It wasn't possible to store a file by itself in 1Password

We looked at these problems and decided that we could solve them by doing three things:
1. Promoting files to being first class citizens in 1Password. This allows one of my favorite features in 1Password.com: Document items. I love storing files in 1Password without thinking about other items.
2. Storing the encrypted file completely separately from the vault. This allowed us to only download files on the devices where you need them, making sync really fast and space efficient.
3. Making it possible to link one item to another item. This allows us to simulate "attachments" by linking to a Document item.

By doing those 3 things we solved the problems we wanted to solve. At least technically. Now fast forward 3 years since those decisions where hashed out and I think that 1 and 2 were super solid ideas and I still stand by them. 3 on the other hand hasn't stood the test of time quite as well. It technically solves the problem, but the usability side effects there are unfortunate. I love the ability to link a single file between multiple items, and I wouldn't want that to go away... but I feel like there's more that should be done to make this problem better.

There's a bit of low hanging fruit for us: bi-directional linking. I say that this is low-hanging fruit cause it's at least conceptually simple, but in reality it's a little tricky and we haven't figured out a good way to do this yet... When I'm looking at a Passport item and click on the linked Document that is the photo of the passport, I should see some way to go back to the Passport. This could be implemented as something like a "back" button even like is common on iOS apps and would probably solve a good chunk of the pain. But ideally it'd be better than that and when you link item A to item B and view item B, you'd see item A listed.

That gets over some of the awkwardness but I think we need to go beyond that.

Documents as items are great, but just because they're great doesn't mean they need to be the only thing. Sometimes you want a file to be tightly associated with an item. Using my previous example... I really don't see when I'd want my passport photo to ever be associated with an item other than my Passport item. So... in those cases why not allow the passport item to point directly to the encrypted file that is my photo without needing to link to a separate item for it. This would technically be possible because of solution 2 above, it'd just require that we do a bit of work then teach all of our apps about it.

As with anything in life, hindsight is 20/20. If we were to design "modern attachments" today we'd do so differently than we did 3 years ago. I still think that what we have is better technologically than the old approach, but I think we need to push it forward a little more and in doing so we can bring the experience and usability up to the same level if not better than it used to be.

Rick

You're right, @iwaddo.

If you're a 1Password for Mac user, you might be interested in knowing that the newly released version 7 contains an encrypted backup feature where periodically (I believe it's every 24 hours) the app will make a local backup of your 1Password.com data to ensure that even in the worst case scenarios you would still have all of your data. One of the niggles there is that "all of your data" should, by definition of "all", contain your document files. So one of the features that has to come along with that is the ability to have files automatically downloaded locally (which would happen out of band from sync, so we'd still get the performance benefits).

I'd love for us to provide options there so that as a user you could dictate what the default behavior should be. Something like "Download All", "Download None", "Download All Less Than X MB".

I specifically mentioned 1Password for Mac as it's the only app that has this implemented so far, but the intention is for the encrypted backup feature to hit 1Password for Windows as well.

In the mean time, I believe if you select all of your Document items and bring up the context menu (right click), there should be a "Download All" menu item available for you.

I hope this helps.

Rick

how do I get to it, how do I make use of it

For now, you don't and you don't, which isn't the answer you're looking for. 7.0 is creating the backups, but they aren't yet usable. The importer is coming in a subsequent release.

So I can force the download of all documents on my iMac, which is always internet connected, but not my mobile devices which are often disconnected from the internet - this seems a little odd.

Agreed. Mobile is a bit of a special beast there. It's more frequently disconnected from the internet, but it's also much more constrained for space. So the answer there isn't obvious. I think we'll need to have a preference/option there for users to be able to set.

For any app, once you've downloaded the document once, you should have locally forever. So for any important document you can make sure it's available on your device and then it should be available going forward.

Rick

It's not as good as it needs to be. It's something we need to do better.

Rick

@iwaddo: I'm not sure that Corey understood what you were asking, as it isn't clear to me either except in light of your latest comments. In cases where 1Password can save the state of the form, it can often reproduce it. We have not designed 1Password to do anything with checkboxes specifically, but it happens to work on many sites that use standard HTML elements. And, in general, we always recommend using the browser extension to save logins because it helps 1Password better know how to fill later on. Cheers! :)

Hey, if you're happy, I'm happy! I also find that manually save a new login in the browser when I have the page filled the way I want is really useful for helping 1Password know the way I want it to fill in the future. Cheers! :)