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September 3, 2021
Question

1Password Vault Backups?

  • September 3, 2021
  • 8 replies
  • 111 views

Several days ago, I realized that somehow, someway I'd lost the encryption key to my 9+ years of Crashplan backups of all of my various computers, which I'd stored in 1Password, and I was freaking the flip out! I have absolutely zero idea what happened to the key, but it was definitely not in 1Password as it should have been! After freaking out all night, I remembered that I still had my old 1Password.agilekeychain files from version 5 on an old Mac, and could copy that over to my current Mac, and import them, which I did! (I've since printed out the encryption key and stored it in my safe, along with my 1Password Recovery key!) But this now has me thinking, what if I hadn't had those old agilekeychain files, what the hell would I have done!? While my Macs are backed up locally, to a NAS and to the cloud on a daily basis, does that mean that my current 1Password keychains are being backed up? If so, where are they stored on my Mac? How do I go about retrieving and importing them? Does 1Password v7.x keep and store backups on the cloud? How often are they backed up? How long are they retained? How do I access them? If I want to create my own backup of my 1Password data, how do I go about it?


1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
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8 replies

1P_Dave
1Password Employee
1Password Employee
September 4, 2021

Hello @kappabear! 👋

If you're using a 1Password account then there is no need to backup your vault since your data is already backed up to your 1Password account in the cloud. If you accidentally delete an item you can always restore it from your 1Password account on 1Password.com:

View and restore previous versions of items

If you're not using a 1Password account and are instead using a standalone vault then you can create a backup of the vault using these instructions: 1Password backups

kappabearAuthor
September 5, 2021

Very good to know. Thanks @1P_Dave.

September 5, 2021

Is that information up-to-date? Or have I set something in Preferences that affects this? Because, when I look, I can see backups from 2017 to 2019 but nothing recent.

1P_Tommy
1Password Employee
1Password Employee
September 5, 2021

@danco

Backups are only for standalone vaults. If you have a membership backups are kept on 1Password.com. I would venture that you moved to a membership sometime in 2019.

September 5, 2021

I thought that was likely. But that's definitely NOT what @1P_Dave says a few posts above. Probably he just got the wording wrong.

1Password Employee
September 5, 2021

@danco and @kappabear,

The definitive answer is that standalone vaults are backed up in to that backup directory. There is a separate AccountExports folder that Account 'backups' happen to, but that is not currently extractable or restorable.

September 5, 2021

Presumably, then, I can remove all the items in the Backup folder, and maybe even the folder itself. And I could remove old files in the AccountExports folder.

Also, this folder will be copied in a clone (using Carbon Copy Cloner, for instance).

Could one manually unzip one of these files and read the results into 1PW?

September 6, 2021

@danco:

We don't recommend touching those folders if possible, since they are populated automatically, but you can certainly remove older data if you need the space :+1: