Hundreds of duplicates in 1Password for Windows

I'm on the newest version, and I am looking at tons of duplicates, but the "Items with duplicates" list is empty. I know I'm in the Mac thread here, and I'm on a PC, but the release notes say it should be available for everyone.

Hey @skathic, thanks for reaching out. Are your duplicate items within the same vault? Or are they across multiple vaults/accounts?

Duplicate detection is currently only for items within the same vault, so that may explain the behaviour you've experienced.

Let me know if that's the case.

Ali

Hi Ali - They're in the same vault. What features are compared to determine duplicates?

Hey @skathic, thanks for your response. The duplicate detector will only detect items that are the exact same.

Do your items have attachments? Items with the same attachments may not be detected at this time.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Ali

Nope. I've even gone so far as to copy/paste the exact URL into both items, make sure neither of them has any tags or any other information.

@skathic

Thanks for the reply. The new "Items with duplicates" feature is very conservative by design. If two items are even a tiny bit different (modified date, etc), 1Password will not remove them. This is done so that 1Password does not perform bulk actions that may result in data loss.

Can you check the created and modified dates to see if they differ between the items? Would you also be able to tell me how the duplicate was created in the first place? Was it due to a migration from an old standalone vault? Did you save it separately from the first item? If you did then did you save it using the browser extension or the desktop app?

I look forward to hearing from you.

-Dave

Hi Dave - well, the modified dates are definitely different now, since I changed the items to ensure that they were identical. They were originally created from a migration from LastPass, and I have no idea about the rest of your questions. This happened ages ago.

A de-dupe tool that is THAT conservative is pretty useless, unfortunately. I look forward to this feature being refined for future functionality.

You can close this comment thread, unless there's new info. Thanks!

@skathic

Thank you for the reply. Since it sounds like the items that you're seeing are not exact duplicates, it's expected behaviour that the duplicates tool in Watchtower isn't detecting them. To protect against data loss, items have to be in the same vault and exactly the same (down to the metadata) in order to be identified as a duplicate.

I've passed along your feedback that you'd like to see the duplicate remover tool be expanded in the future to our product team. For the time being, manually going through the items is the best option. You can tag all of your items with a "TO AUDIT" tag and then remove that tag from each item after you've checked for duplicates for that item. I'm sorry that there isn't a more elegant solution at this time.

As requested, I'm closing this thread. Thank you again for the feedback. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-36980178