Does 1Password 8 change local backup situation?

Thanks for sharing, @mikebore. Not locking people in is important to us as well. 1PUX is the most comprehensive export format we've ever offered, so I'm fairly proud of that. Now it'll be up to competitors to offer solid importing of it. Glad to hear it sounds like there is at least one already doing that.

Ben

Thanks 1P_Rob

Not being locked in is important to me. (I am the same with Photo organisation where I keep an organised backup set of photo files which are not locked in to the proprietary organisation of Adobe and Apple libraries).

Anyway I just did a trial 1Pux export/import to a well known competitor and it worked, so I feel much more comfortable staying with 1Password 8 knowing this. My purpose in reporting this to reassure others who might feel like me, that we are not locked in, not to encourage a move, which I have no intention of doing.

The predecessor to 1PUX was 1PIF (1Password Interchange Format), which actually is supported by other apps, and I imagine 1PUX will be supported in the future as well. Unsurprisingly, providing an export format that is easy for computers to read makes for a very attractive import feature for our competitors. 😄 In exchange, they often provide rather awful exports (like CSV) that take quite a bit of effort for us to import correctly. But we want to provide a nice export option so users never feel locked in. That's the purpose of 1PUX.

A PDF export is not something that a competitor would ever attempt to import. That's more along the lines of the Armageddon scenario. I'm not sure it's currently on the roadmap, but I've passed it on to the team for consideration.

Thanks for the feedback!

ref: IDEA-I-873

Thanks Rob, though not very encouraging. I guess it really depends if 1PUX and 1PEX ever become recognised formats for importing to other apps. Otherwise with no PDF export and incomplete CSV, committing to 1P8 is a one way street.

Hey, @mikebore. Sorry for the delayed response here.

CSV exports are great for tabular data but notoriously awful for structured data. There is typically an expectation with CSV that a column means the same thing for every cell in the column. If we follow that approach, you'd have Login items with blank credit card number fields, Credit Cards with blank username and password fields, and all sorts of other combinations like that which would make the CSV have tons of mostly empty columns and be very hard to use. A better option would probably be to export multiple CSVs, one for every item type, but that's hard to use in other ways, and you still have the same problem for every custom field you add to an item. For now, we felt that the use case of exporting just usernames and passwords in a CSV was the most clear.

I don't have a status update on 1PEX, but it's not going to be more accessible than 1PUX, mostly because the data will be encrypted. Both of those formats are designed for computers, not humans, to parse, but because 1PUX is unencrypted, it's possible to use it for your Armageddon scenario, even though it's not designed for that purpose.

As I said earlier I find the 1PUX process very clunky and impenetrable compared to exporting PDFs from 1P7.

The CSV file looks usable but as you implied is incomplete. Why is that? I can't see any pattern to what is missing?

Perhaps I could have an update on this please. You mentioned 1PEX format....how is that coming on? will it be more accessible than 1PUX?

Thanks

You didn't mention the option to export a CSV file which gives Logins and Passwords which is far more usable (when opened in Excel), at least for those.

Admittedly I missed that we'd shipped that. Thanks for pointing it out. :+1: This contains much less data than 1PUX, but if it serves the purpose, that's great.

I am not too concerned about the loss of capability here compared to 1P7, but hope it will stay on the list to be improved as mentioned.

For sure. :)

Ben

Thanks Ben. I had to download a third party app to unzip the 1PUX but can now see the export.data file which I opened in TextEdit. I confess that it seems virtually unusable to me!
You didn't mention the option to export a CSV file which gives Logins and Passwords which is far more usable (when opened in Excel), at least for those.
I am not too concerned about the loss of capability here compared to 1P7, but hope it will stay on the list to be improved as mentioned.

The only export we have in 1Password 8, at the moment, is 1PUX. Inside the 1PUX zip will be an export.data file which you can open and review with a text editor.

Ben

Thanks. So has exporting to PDF has been dropped from 1Password8?

I had seen that article about pux files before posting previously but am unable to find anything to browse. The article says it is a zip archive, so I tried opening it with Archiver app, but couldn't reach anything browseable/searchable. Can you give a pointer?