Restoring Safari backup to recover missing Logins
My wife and I recently upgraded to 1Password 4 on our MacBooks. I haven't had any issues, but in the last few days she's noticed that many of her logins (including generated logins that she uses every month to pay bills) are no longer available in 1Password 4.
So I reinstalled the 1Password 3 app and opened it up to see if the logins were lost in the migration to version 4. Unfortunately, I didn't see the missing logins there either. I tried restoring previous backups (from within 1Password 3) and still couldn't find the logins. In fact, if I sort by Created Date, there are no entries at all for 2013, which is definitely impossible (1Password 4 also has no entries for 2013, except the very few she's saved in recent days).
I know she only uses the browser extension (and never opens the standalone app). Is it possible that the 1Password extension she was using was saving logins to a different location? A strange, potentially related issue: when I went to open 1Password 4 on her Mac this morning (the application, rather than the browser extension), I got an error that said "Beta build has expired" and the app closed itself. Neither of us ever intentionally installed a 1Password beta on the machine, so I don't know what this was. I downloaded 1Password 4 from the website and installed it and was able to open it.
If I accidentally had the beta version, is it possible it was saving logins somewhere strange?
Other notes:
No syncing is set up on her machine.
If I look in the backups history in both 1Password 3 and 1Password 4, there are far too few items in the login count. Again, even if I go back several entries in the history, I see no entries for all of 2013, even though I know she was saving and successfully using passwords throughout the year.
There are no logins in the Trash.
Any suggestions? Extremely concerned about getting these missing logins back.
Comments
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Bump. Really would like a response here - haven't heard anything back from AgileBits via forum, twitter, or email.
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Hello @batkins,
The "Beta Build Expired" message accidentally appeared in version 4.0.2 and is fixed in the latest version. Please see sjk's post for upgrade instructions for confirmed steps on how to fix this and my follow up comment for and explanation of what happened.
As for the missing Logins, I wonder if they were created using the 1Password 3 browser extension or if they were created within the main app itself. If they were created in the browser extension they would need to sync to the main 1Password 3 app before they would be able to sync over to 1Password 4. Hopefully you still have the 1Password 3 extension installed and can launch it to see if your logins are there. If so we can work on getting them to sync to the main application.
Please let me know and I'll try to help further.
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Hi dteare,
They were created in the 1Password 3 browser extension, but that extension was uninstalled when I set up 1Password 4. I have weekly Time Machine backups going back for months - can I recover the passwords out of the browser extension from a Time Machine backup?
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I truly feel sorry for your situation. :( I've never heard of anyone just using the extension and never opening the main app. Not even once? The extension is an "extension" of the full-featured main app and isn't a permanent storage of its own, as you have now learned. It is supposed to regularly communicate with the main app to sync changes.
Extension settings are stored in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Extensions/1Password.safariextension
The bad news... Time Machine does not back up useless log files, useless caches (~/Library/Caches is temporary storage and is intended to be unimportant), certain system files, etc.
I wish I had better news for you. :((
Here's hoping that you have the same email on all websites and a good memory, so that you can use password restore on them all.
In slightly more positive news, 1Password 4 is rebuilt from the ground up and the browser extensions don't store their own copies of the database anymore. Everything is handled by the 1Password Mini application, which is always in sync with the main application, because they use the exact same database on-disk.
In other words: In 1Password 4 it's fine to never open the main application. In 1P3, it was not fine... it never gave the browser extension a chance to sync its changes from its temporary cache-storage to the permanent database.
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Oh boy @batkins, this is terrible news. As @Uno_Lavoz mentioned the 1Password 3 extension would store it's information within a database managed by Safari. When uninstalling an extension Safari will automatically cleanup any associated databases. Unfortunately it removes the files completely instead of moving them to the Trash so there is no way to restore them other than from a backup.
Do you have any backups available? The folder we're looking for is ~/Library/Safari/Databases. Please let me know and I'll be happy to help you try to restore the files in the proper order.
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Hi dteare,
Yep, we have tons of backups. I have backups of ~/Library/Safari/Databases going back to before I installed 1Password 4. Which subfolder should I look for?
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Oh perfect! This is great news @batkins. This reinforces my favorite saying that no one ever complained about having too many backups after a disaster :)
I just ran through a test restore of a Safari database on my machine and it worked great. Below are the steps I followed:
Start the main 1Password 3 app, make sure you can unlock your keychain there. Create a new keychain if needed. You can download version 3 from here if needed:
Download the 1Password 3 browser extension:
Install the extension. As soon as it is installed you should have a new folder here:
~/Library/Safari/Databases/safari-extension_com.agilebits.onepassword-safari-2bua8c4s2c_0
Open this folder in Finder and you should a database file called something like "0000000000000003.db". The number will likely be different for you so you will need to pay close attention to the name. Your backup file might be "0000000000000002.db" for example.
Quit Safari. This is a really important step so I'm going to repeat it a few times :) Before copying over you backup file, be sure to Quit Safari to ensure it doesn't corrupt your database.
Copy over your database file from your backup to replace the current database file. You should probably use Finder but here's the Terminal command command I used while testing this so you can see exactly what I did:
cp 0000000000000002.db ~/Library/Safari/Databases/safari-extension_com.agilebits.onepassword-safari-2bua8c4s2c_0/0000000000000003.db
Start Safari. You should be able to unlock the 1Password extension and see your data there.
Hopefully at this point you can see all your original data. Now we need to sync it to the main 1Password application. Your data should sync automatically once you have both the extension and the main app unlocked, but you might see a badge on your 1Password toolbar icon that will indicate a syncing problem. In this case click on the Troubleshooting icon to see the details, as shown here.
Please let me know how it turns out.
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Hi @dteare,
I was able to find the agilebits folder in an old version of ~/Library/Safari/Databases/. So far, so good.
However, on the extensions link you sent me, I only see an option to download the 1Password 4 extension - where do I get the extension for version 3?
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Hi @batkins,
That's strange, I clicked on the link in Dave's post and was taken to the version 3 extension page. Please try this link: https://agilebits.com/extensions/mac/safari.html?beta=n. Does that work any better?
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Sorry for the radio silence - I haven't been able to take a look at this for a few weeks.
I wanted to let you know that @dteare's steps worked (!). I can now see all of the missing passwords in the 1Password 3 app.
To protect our current password databases from accidental merging with the old one, I created a new OS X user and copied over 1Password's Application Support folder and the Safari databases into the new user's home folder. I then followed the instructions above and I can know see all of the logins in the new username.
What's the best way to safely merge this data into 1Password 4 in the real user account? If I use the interchange format on the entire old database and import it into 1Password 4, will it safely merge the data and ask me to resolve conflicts? If not, is there another way you'd recommend safely combining these two databases (some passwords have been added or updated since the botched upgrade to 1Password 4, so I don't want old information from 1Password 3 to overwrite new information).
Thanks!
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*can now see
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Hi @batkins,
Thanks so much for letting us know that Dave's steps worked! I'm so glad we were able to get your data back.
You're right, your best option is to export the new data via .1pif format from the new user account and then import that file into your existing database. You might end up with a few conflicts that you'll need to manually resolve, but it won't over-write the newer data.
Please let us know how the import works for you :)
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