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C
ChuckPass
November 25, 2025
Question

Finding Almost Duplicates

  • November 25, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 133 views

Hello All,

I support 1Password in our company of mostly Mac computers. (new to it myself, though) We have a user on a Macbook Air who imported passwords three times over the last year. (I'll give him credit. He's trying!) Each import does have a tag with the import date. 

I want to remove the old duplicated items from his vault. Watchtower does not show any duplicates. My guess, I haven't confirmed yet, that the items are not exact duplicates. Certainly the tags are different. (Hmm, maybe if I delete the tags they would become duplicates?)

I don't want to just delete all items with an old tag because I I can't confirm that all the old ones (> 300 items) have new versions. Maybe there's a way to do that?

Maybe we export all of them, delete duplicates in Excel, delete all in 1Password, and then import them again? I'm liking this option. When he did the imports, it didn't keep the Titles. It made new Titles with the website+username (I think). Yuck! Screwed up his logins for apps. 

This brings up a missing feature. When 1Password imports items, it would be good if it recognized the duplicates at that time and then give options on what to do with them, e.g. not import, keep newest, keep oldest, keep both, merge (?). I'm sure there's a feature request site somewhere.

Thank you for any advice.

1 reply

1P_Dave
1P_Dave
1Password Employee
November 26, 2025

Hello @ChuckPass! 👋

Thanks for the questions! If the duplicate items are exactly the same and in the same vault then you can also use 1Password's Watchtower tool to clean them up:

  1. Open and unlock 1Password for Mac.
  2.  Click on Watchtower in the sidebar.
  3.  Click on Show Items under Items with duplicates.


However, as you mentioned, this only applies to exact duplicates and items that were imported by your user three different times with different dates and metadata wouldn't match here.

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to resolve a situation where a user imported items three different times and may have been updating those items randomly over the last year. If this had been caught right away then I would have suggested removing all of the items from 1Password and re-importing them from the other password manager but that isn't an option now since the user has been updating the items in 1Password for a year. The best way to address the issue would be to choose one set of the items (based on the Imported tag) and move those items to a new vault. Then go through the items one by one, making sure that the item in the new vault has all of the information needed before deleting the other duplicates. 

I'm sorry that I don't have a better option to share. I've filed a feature request based on your suggestions with our team internally so that they can look into enhancements to the import and duplicate detector in the future. I did have one question: did the user say why they imported the items three different times? Were they having trouble locating an item? 

-Dave

PB-52078475

C
ChuckPassAuthor
November 26, 2025

@1P_Dave  Thank you, Dave. I appreciate the quick response. Also, filing the feature request.

Is there a reason why we couldn't export all of the items and use Excel or something to de-dupe? Then import them again? 

The first time seems to have been when he first got 1Password. Not sure on the second. The third is when we were starting to enforce the usage, forgetting that he'd done it twice before.

Chuck

1P_Dave
1P_Dave
1Password Employee
November 27, 2025

@ChuckPass 

Thank you for sharing those additional details. In general, I advise against exporting your passwords and opening them in another app like Excel since that will remove your sensitive login credentials from the protected and secure environment of 1Password and leave them in plaintext.

It also increases the risk of inadvertently having your operating system, or an app like Excel, sync your passwords in plaintext to the cloud. 

-Dave

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