Cleaned up my vaults

If this is the wrong place to enter this information, please move it as appropriate.  Just when the 1Password team changed to the forum format, I was prepared to provide the below information.  I do not recall where I was going to enter it.  I was a bit frustrated that cleaning up vault duplicates was so difficult.  Because so many of the forum comments are business related, which I am not...I have a home family personal account, not business, it seems I drove my 1password in directions that were counterproductive.  So I bit the bullet and my discussion below is a little history and what I did to correct the problem.  It definately "Made My 1Password life Great Again".  If anyone has suggestions to offer, I am all eyes.

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I’m a retired engineer, with about 50% of my career spent in programming. As an early adopter of password managers—beginning with my first iPhone—I’ve seen many improvements over the years. While I once thought I was well-versed in password managers, I’ve recently realized there’s still much more to learn.

In recent months, I’ve delved into the complexities of Passkeys, MFA, and Authenticators. During this process, I discovered that I didn’t fully understand how 1Password managed accounts, collections, and vaults in my family setup. To deepen my understanding, I began reading and testing—quickly realizing just how much I had overlooked about both 1Password and password management in general.

When I transitioned from DataVault to 1Password in its early days, I wasn’t fully aware of how duplicated items were handled across vaults. I mistakenly assumed that items couldn’t be duplicated, so I ended up creating duplicates across several vaults shared between my wife and me. This turned out to be a mistake, as I learned that duplicated items don’t sync across vaults when one of them is updated. I’ve since learned that it’s best practice to move items rather than duplicate them.

Determined to correct the issue, I set out to address over 1,000 active items to identify and resolve all duplicates. I soon discovered that 1Password doesn’t offer a utility for comparing cross-vault items, so I sought suggestions from both 1Password and other sources on how to identify duplicates. While there weren’t any perfect solutions, one suggestion was to export my 1Password database to Excel via CSV, which would allow me to locate duplicated items. Since I’m comfortable with Excel, I thought this could be a viable option.

I also relearned that the 1Password database resides on my computer and is encrypted. After exporting the CSV file, I loaded it into Excel. The file contained over 4,000 items from my entire family account, including archived and deleted items (but not yet permanently removed). The export provided details such as names, locations, passwords, and other data, but it notably excluded Passkeys. One unexpected issue was the absence of the "parent" vault in the CSV. According to the 1Password forum, there’s no way to export the parent vault's name, so I attempted to explore the 1PUX option, by exporting a 1PUX file, changing its extension to ZIP, unzipping it, and opening the contents in a text editor. However, the resulting JSON files were too complex to decipher, so I abandoned this approach. I suspect that 1Password’s developers have an internal tool for this task, though it’s not available to users like me.

Through further experimentation with the exported CSV files, I began to think of 1Password as one large database of items for my family account, where queries create sub-databases (vaults) containing specific items. The user interface then sets logical markers in various columns to indicate ownership, vault name, an archived item, a deleted item, and other factors. Items are only permanently deleted from the database when they’re removed from a vault. Deleting an entire vault removes all associated items, including archives and deleted items.

After reviewing the initial CSV export, I realized that I didn’t need the archived or deleted items. I permanently removed them from the database, consolidated the remaining items into a single vault, and exported the CSV file once more. This time, I was left with around 1,000 items—a much more manageable list. I reviewed each item, both in the interface and the Excel file, and deleted outdated or unused entries. I then created new vaults for both my wife and myself, manually moving each item to the appropriate vault, based on our typical user IDs (email addresses).

So, what do we have now? No more duplicates. My account now contains 367 items, while my wife’s contains 66. All items are properly synced across vaults. We each have two personal accounts: each with a private vault and a regular vault. We no longer need a vault labeled "Share." My wife has access only to her owned vaults, while I have access view to both mine and her vaults (except, of course, her private vault, which 1Password doesn’t allow me to access). I’ve also stopped using collections, as they’re unnecessary for our current setup.

Finally, I have two additional accounts I haven’t mentioned—set up years ago to manage the logins of two deceased family members. I keep these accounts for posterity.