1Password 8 Printing

I look forward to news of being able to print out accounts, passwords too in a secure manner.

@tsee

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! One of the problems with printing your passwords is something called "versioning". Sure, you could print all of the items in your vault and then, momentarily, have a perfect copy. But the copy would only remain a perfect copy until you changed one of your items. And then you'd need to update just that one item in your printed copy since you probably don't want to print dozens or hundreds of pages when you change just one item. In my experience, maintaining a printed copy of items can get unwieldy very quickly. What if you update a username for a website while you're on vacation and away from your printed copy? You might forget to update the printed copy when you return because of the stress associated with travel. Or what if a family member changes something in an item that is in a shared vault without telling you? Suddenly your printed copy is outdated and you won't even know it.

That being said, there are ways around this problem. For example, 1Password could set a tag letting you know that an item was updated and then the tag could be automatically removed when you print that item. That is definitely something that has been suggested to the team before.

When it comes to the risks of printing your items there are a couple big ones that I can detail off the top of my head:

1. When items are stored in 1Password they're protected by our end-to-end encryption. The only way to unlock 1Password and see your items is by using your account password and Secret Key. A printed copy of your items is no longer protected by that encryption but is available plain text to anyone who might stumble across it.
2. Even when the 1Password app is unlocked 1Password still has other systems that continue to protect your data. For example, on the Mac we invoke a macOS security feature called Secure Input when you edit an item to make sure that what you type into 1Password won't be intercepted by other applications or keyloggers. When you print items our security processes are no longer involved and your data goes through your system unencrypted and unprotected by 1Password. This means that not only does your printer have access to your items, but so does the printer's driver, the communications method between your computer and the printer, and any apps or appliances on your device, the printer, or the network, that might be snooping along the way.

Are you trying to make your items available to someone else in the case of an emergency? Or are you concerned about something happening to 1Password and you'd like to have a backup of your data just in case?

-Dave

Adding my perspective on why I want to print everything in my 1password vault.

It was suggested that the info in the vaults changes often. Actually the reason I use 1password is so I can make very complex/long passwords for my most important (financial, credit card, etc) logins. They do not change often. I usually only change them when I learn about a hack on the site i have a login for. I also have multi-factor-auth on all of those login's.

I have a "second tier" of logins to sites where I don't have credit card, bank, or other critical info. I've started using 1password on those sites to make more complex logins, so again they don't change often.

I have a family vault with my spouse, and a separate one for work. It is quite possible that my wife or I will make a mistake (fat finger, copy/paste error, or whatever) and loose a login. I used to print a hardcopy list every so often and put it in the safe "just in case". A "belt and suspenders" approach if you will.

It's been said a number of times that printing is not secure. It would be helpful to know exactly what the risks are. I.e if my macBook drive is encrypted, and I print to my home wifi network printer over a secure connection and the printer is secure, is that a big risk relative to all the other ways that bad actors are trying to steal our credentials? What i'm suggesting is that 1password should allow printing, and help us understand and minimize the risks we are taking.

Thanks!
Tom

johnnygoodface

Thank you for the suggestion! I've passed it along to the product team. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-30498904

Print individually on the Web (and in colour in top of that!) ? I didn’t know it was a thing. Now if you could make it work with tags (to do multi-printing) I could live with that… easier within the app and more flexible but web only would do a very good first step!

rporegan

Thank you for sharing your use case, I've passed it along to the team. 🙂

In the meantime, you can still print the items that you mentioned individually when you log in to your 1Password account on 1Password.com (in the browser, not the app).

-Dave

Add my vote to enable printing. My use is a little different from the other commenters here, so I thought I would add my perspective. I use 1Password as a secure vault for a small number of documents and information that I need to access. They often contain things that I need to share - medications I take, medical histories, the dates and batch numbers of vaccinations, and so on… I'm not printing out passwords (although I might need to do that too at some point), but I do need a simple way to print such information while also keeping it secure. 1Password was how I accomplished all of those things. Please restore ASAP..

johnnygoodface,

Thanks for sharing more details about your use case. We generally recommend using a copy of your Emergency Kit for similar purposes. As the data stored in 1Password is dynamic and always subject to change, keeping a safe way to access your account can ensure more accuracy than keeping a static copy of the data itself. That said though, we do recognize the part we play in estate planning and hope to bring improvements in the future. I've shared your feedback with the rest of the team.

@mhbmhbmhb,

It is still possible to export from 1Password 8, you can find more information on our website: How to export data from 1Password

I've also added your feedback re: printing to our internal tracker on the topic, thanks for letting us know it's important to you.

ref: IDEA-I-285
ref: IDEA-I-1458

Wow seriously you can not export your file and print from 1PW 8? I just paid for a 1-year family plan and I knew this was a feature available in the past. Why would you take this away?

1P_PeterG Once a month I print my own Identity Card which contain a bunch of personal information, password, lock combinaisons, encryption keys for USBs, etc. I put that paper sheet in my bank vault so that it's easily readable for when I'm gone.

Also, I've tags a bunch of logins entries (for example: "ForDad") and all print those on a regular basis again for my bank vault. I'm doing all that because it's much easier to read this information compared to using a USB Key (1. plug in the encrypted USB key, 2. type in its password, 3. open the file (remember that CSV or 1PUX are not easy to print for someone NOT good with computers) 4. print ALL the passwords, 5. and finally look for the needed password within all those printed passwords)

Please re-instate the print functionality

Thanks