First Impressions

then you have four copies of your database: one we maintain*, and one on each device. Just in case that's helpful to know!

Except, it turns out, if your account is suspended in which case all your devices delete their data the next time you login, and you can be left with no local copy of anything. Synchronization is not backup.

Previous versions allowed me to create a local backup, this is back in 1Password vaults which aren't synchronized, but why can't I have a local backup of synchronized vaults? I want to take responsibility for my own data. I have encrypted snapshots going back years for most of the important things in my life.

There is a lot I love about 1Password, the product, the company and the staff, but having to maintain a second password manager with my genuinely critical things (access to email) just to have some degree of ability to recover is a lot of unnecessary overhead.

I wouldn't want to use a service where there was only one copy of my data, and that copy was in the cloud and not on my device.

Given that the cloud can remove the data from my local device, this is effectively what you are doing.