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March 16, 2023
Question

Request Related To Archived Items

  • March 16, 2023
  • 12 replies
  • 431 views

I'll be honest, I wish there was a way to pull up archived items when filling a login, such as when I'm singing into an app (e.g. on iPhone), a webpage, or elsewhere. I transitioned my 1Pass data from using an "Archive" vault to using the 1Password archive feature, and that's the one missing thing for me.


1Password Version: 8.x.x
Extension Version: 2.7.x
OS Version: iOS 16.x.x; macOS 13.x.x
Browser:_ Safari

12 replies

March 16, 2023

It might be you have a slightly wrong idea what the archive function is for. Archiving items is a lesser delete. It's for moving old/obsolete/legacy items away without actually deleting them. Because of this, they will not show up for autofill.

If you use the archive as some kind of category or grouping functionality, I propose you assign a tag to all archived items to be able to find them later, then reinstate the items out of the archive to make them active again. Assigning tags to items is the way to manage/organize items.

nimvioAuthor
March 23, 2023

Former Member , I understand what you're getting at. But there's some instances where I want to link items to other items, some of which are in Archive, or all of which (that I want to link) are in Archive. The only way to get around that is to "restore" the items, link them, and then re-archive them. And another scenario is when, on the rare occasion, I want to search for an item in Archive while I'm using the 1Password extension (for example), and I'd at least like a way to manually access (or at least just search for) it without having to go into the app.

1P_Tommy
1Password Employee
March 23, 2023

@nimvio

I continue to have a vault used to hold some lesser used items (think relatives admin type items). You might look at placing the needed ones into an additional vault and then setting up one or more collections. You could have one that includes the new lesser used items vault but also one that does not. This is more of a forward thinking post as collections have not made it to 1Password in the browser, yet, I have my fingers crossed we'll see that at some point in the future. Collections in the browser is one of the things I eagerly anticipate.

For the browser you could optionally set the given vault you're using for lesser used items to not be show. This can be done from within the 1Password in the browser settings.

April 9, 2023

Former Member I am attempting to do exactly what you suggest -- assign a tag to a group of items that I want to Archive. This is so that I can move them out of the way, and then go through them/find them as a group later. This is a workaround for not having vaults or subfolders within the Archive.

So, I just did a test where I added a tag to one of these items and moved it to Archive. I wanted to then see if I could find the item in the Archive via the tag. Some observations:
* Regular Search doesn't allow me to search only in the Archive, but using Edit->Find I can get a search box local to the Archive. (NB it is unintuitive to have two ways to search)
* I cannot "Find" by Tag. If I search for the tag label, the item doesn't come up (only items that happen to match the tag label in the title/record text)

Is there a way to add constraints to a search so that it searches (a) only the Archive, (b) only items with a certain tag [in the Archive]?

April 9, 2023

As a follow-up, another way to do (archive everything in an old vault) what I am trying to do would be to have a vault-specific Archive.

I saw https://1password.community/discussion/122298/how-to-move-items-from-a-bespoke-archive-vault-to-the-official-archive-trash that seems to suggest this is possible. But I don't see how to do this; I only see one Archive for the entire account.

Has this functionality gone?

Thanks.

nimvioAuthor
April 10, 2023

Thanks for the reply about my comment about accessing archived items outside of the normal way, @1P_Tommy. I like your mention about utilizing Collections. However, there's been a "bug" related to Collections that I haven't seen fixed yet for quite some time. That is, when I choose a Collection via the desktop app, and then I search for an item using Quick Access & open it directly in the 1Password app, the setting for Collections immediately gets changed to show the entire account, all vaults & items. This happens even when I open an item that's within the vaults that are within the Collection I've set. Hopefully that makes sense.

To test it out, open 1Password and pick a Collection from the dropdown menu, close the desktop app, search for an item using Quick Access, use the keyboard command (on Mac) Cmd +Shift + O, and notice the app defaults back to your account, not the Collection.

Thanks!

April 10, 2023

@yousayduh You seem to misunderstand the purpose of the archive. The archive is for final disposal of dead items, just without actually deleting them. You're not supposed to work with items you moved into the archive. It's a trashcan, just without the function to empty it and flush all items, so you can restore items in case you archived them in error. It's a huge unsorted heap of the items you don't need any more, but don't want to delete either, to still have the old information in case the need arises to review them.

So neither the default search nor the default tag list work for the archive. That's per design, that's the purpose (and not a flaw) of the archive.

If you want to move items "out of the way", consider moving them into different vaults and use collections to switch the search scope between the collections.

April 11, 2023

Former Member Thanks for your reply.

I do understand the purpose of the Archive. I am helping a less-technical family member who made a mess of their vaults after migrating from a stand-alone version of 1Password. There appear to be 3-4 copies of nearly every item. I believe the imported ones are safe to remove, but can't be 100% certain, and I am using tags to keep track of the source of these items. The dates aren't reliable either, as the most recently imported ones seem to show that they were modified on the import date, even if they weren't in fact modified. Of course, a duplicate detector would also be useful in this instance.

This person also struggles with 'fiddling' with the mobile app to switch the search scope. Perhaps if we can set a collection as the default search scope (in the Android app) I can set it up for them and the issue will be mitigated. I will try. But based on what @nimvio has said, this may not work.

Once I move the suspected outdated items to the Archive, there will be 1000s of items there. As you point out, if "the need arises to review them", it would be helpful to support more nuanced review. The tags are there, it would be nice to be able to use them in the search to help with the process. A search semantics for the Find field such as tag:XYZ, title:ABC (analogous to from:ABC subject:XYZ in email search) could address this.

But I have set up the collections; let's see how it goes.

April 11, 2023

@yousayduh I understand. That's quite a challenge.

I would never handle 1000s of items manually. Only scripted. Manually would take many days of tedious work.

If I had that task to remove duplicates, I would create an export, then extract the *.json formatted vault data and write a script that reads this *.json data. Then the script would group all items by title, website and password. All items with these 3 fields identical are duplicates, and from such a group I would write the entry with the newest modification date to a file for re-import.

However, this all needs programming skills.

nimvioAuthor
April 11, 2023

Former Member, thanks for contributing to this conversation. I'm not sure that 1Password has said either way whether or not the Archive feature is like " trashcan, just without the function to empty it and flush all items, so you can restore items in case you archived them in error". That functionality basically exists as Recently Deleted Items, where you can restore or destroy items for up to 365 days (last I checked).

Prior to Archive, I used a separate vault for archived items, which I considered to be any logins (or other types) that may still exist & are either active or in a dormant state, but that I don't want cluttering up my other items. All I was originally hoping for here was to have something as straightforward as a button to access the archived items through the browser extensions. I guess I could go back to my old method, but I figured I'd transition to the official 1Password way because I anticipated (& wanted to be ready for) 1Password to further improve upon & expand their implementation of Archive.