I had some really old 1Password software on my system. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it works great and I think that the passwords are stored locally. When 1Password announced it was moving to a cloud based model, I was as equally annoyed as the security community was (Why Security Experts Are Pissed That 1Password Is Pushing Users to the Cloud). But, the writing was on the walls and I knew I was gonna have to move someday.
Around the end of January 2019 I thought that day had come. 1Password integration stopped working in Chrome and none of the normal restart, reinstall tricks worked. It looks like around mid-February 1Password updated their troubleshooting guide to include a note that Chrome 72 will no longer work with 1Password4. For me … this was fantastic news. Because it meant 1Password wasn’t dropping support for people that liked have a local password vault as opposed to the cloud solution. All they wanted was for users to upgrade to a new version, 1Password7. And from a developer perspective that completely understandable.
WARNING: For Dropbox users you’ll want to stop all 1Password4 instances on all machines before upgrading to 1Passsword7 on one machine.
Upgrading from 1Password4 to 1Password7 was not too bad, but not as smooth as the guide suggested. Downloading and installing 1Password7 was really easy. And the installation popped up the new 1Password7 initial setup screen which reported 1Password had been updated to the latest version. Now, the next step. I was going to have to create an account.
Clicking on Start my trail took me to the website, where I was able to create an account pretty easily. Reading through the setup made it pretty clear it was going to be a subscription based payment model. Which I’m fine with, everything is moving that way. If you want to use a standalone license, it’s a little harder and their isn’t as much easy guidance. The closest description I found was on their websites forum and hidden in the menu on the initial setup screen.
Once I was able to sign into the local Windows 7 App using the new credentials the import process was pretty smooth. Just select to old folder location on disk and it will convert it over just as described in their update article.
Their update article also says to uninstall the older 1Password4 to ensure things on the system to prevent conflicts. When I went through the uninstall process I did receive a somewhat unexpected message about 1Password4 still running.
Since I’ve never learned how to properly shutdown 1Password4 from the application, this powershell snippet might be useful:
And that was it, all setup.
Updating Chrome Extension
For chrome, I just needed to Remove the 1Password Chrome Extension and then re-install it.
Now for the other machines
Okay … so that was machine #1. But, what about all the other machines that are using the vault through a Dropbox sync. For those, it’s a bit rougher but not bad. If you didn’t uninstall all the 1Password instances off your other machines before the first upgrade, you may have difficulty updating the other machines. The issue I ran into was the 1Password7 installer just wouldn’t run. There is a forum post which resolves the issue by renaming a file a disk.
Note: The “Emergency Kit” which includes the QRCode code to quickly enter 1password configuration information is very useful at this stage.
And finally the old cell phone
Because DropBox was copying over the new .opvault data to each machine, I was afraid that the cell phone might start try to recreate the .agilekeychain storage system in DropBox. I went through the installed application and found a way to update the application to repoint to the new .opvault, but … I just decided not to do that.
Instead, uninstalling the phone app and reinstalling was much cleaner and easier. It took a few moments and I could use the cell phone camera to scan the QRCode for setup. It did point out one thing that is important to note:
The .opvault has a seperate Master Password on it from your 1password.com account. It still uses the original password from 1Password4. If you setup your new 1password.com account to have the same password as the .opvault you may be very surprised in the future if you change the 1password.com password but your .opvault still requires the old one.
