Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#61

Post by mdaniel »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #46
gonehome wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1Password remains really great imo - people seem to use worse alternatives for ideological reasons but I don’t think there are any that are actually better.

How is it better than BitWarden? I’ve used both and they both seem fine but I didn’t see an obvious reason to prefer it. BW is a lot cheaper as well.

My experience is that 1P has a lot more polish and consideration for the user (err, I mean before the "8" debacle). I cannot recall a single time I have lost an autogenerated password, whereas with BW it happened about 50% of the time. Filling up my vault with hundreds of unnecessary password captures is better than losing a single one, because they don't know how important any one password is in order to gauge how "oops, sorrreeee, our bad" affects the user

https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/1620 (open since Feb 2021)

Aside from that, 1P has a ton more item types, which if one thinks about a password manager as a key-value store, maybe that's not interesting, but for me it's been really great having passport details in a specific spot, without having to invent my own taxonomy for squeezing passport details into key-value pairs

Speaking of taxonomy, BW's lack of tagging is a dealbreaker for me. Why in the world do I have to pick just one "folder" for an item to live in: it can be "work" *and* "aws" *and* "testing" allowing me to see all work, all aws, all testing items grouped together

I do hate the new 1P api-only approach, but I'm not going to jump ship just yet because the competition is not yet better for my needs

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#62

Post by julianlam »

kosolam wrote: post #32

Quoted post unavailable.

> This is completely devastating for my trust in this software and company.

Okay, I guess you should ask for a refund, then.

Yes, that's a snarky response, but in all seriousness, the BW team is good at refunding, so if you're unsatisfied, ask for a refund and move on.

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#63

Post by nirvdrum »

longrod wrote: post #21

This makes a lot of sense. I use Notesnook [0] which also encrypts everything client side. It also doesn't export attachments in the automatic backups. I asked the devs and this is done to save user's bandwidth and also to make everything more reliable. Suppose the user's internet is slow or metered, what should be done then? Would the backup never be taken? That's obviously a bad idea since the notes are too importa…

I'm not familiar with the tool, but naïvely I'd think offering an "include attachments" checkbox would give the user control over backup size. I know that might complicate the UI a bit and maybe even confuse user by having the option, but expecting all of your data to be backed up and only discovering that it isn't after it's too late isn't stellar UX either.

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#64

Post by mdaniel »

phpisthebest wrote: post #31
laurent123456 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering why their enterprise clients are ok with this though. I would have thought they'd get more pressure from them since most businesses would not want to lose all their attachments if there's a problem.

As an Enterprise Client, I did not even know there was attachments, and i dont know what I would use attachments for...

Splunk licenses (and likely a ton of other enterprise-y software) are actual files, so when we renew our license, it goes into 1P as an attachment on our Splunk item

I recognize that's not what you would use attachments for, but I'm offering that there are enterprises that get benefit from attachments, not just individual users

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#65

Post by mdaniel »

foobiekr wrote: post #37

This is sadly common. 1Password does not either.

Incorrect, I just tested it:

    $ unzip -l 1PasswordExport-ILESALYKVFDNJH3K24FEO3QRHM-20220611-100457.1pux
    ...
       1952  01-01-1980 00:00   files/dbp6d2jjtfbwbp5tnqx6vw5jaa__developerID_installer.pem

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#66

Post by vbezhenar »

manmal wrote: post #55
1una wrote: post #42

> A simple solution would be to b64 encode each file and add it into an array! An individual file attachment can be as large as 500 MB[0]. It would make the JSON file too big to use. Still, I do think that Bitwarden should warn users about it when exporting. Just mentioning it in the Help Center doesn't seem so helpful. [0]: https://bitwarden.com/help/attachments/

Why is such a JSON file too big to use if it’s only ever handled by streaming parsers? SQLite would be a better backup format ofc.

AFAIK SQLite field limit is 2 GB, so if you're used to storing Blurays in your password database, that might be a limiting factor as well.

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#67

Post by sir_brickalot »

Hellion wrote: post #49

I’m still on KeePass. I keep meaning to get off of it but it more or less works okay (not great) I use windows, Debian, iOS, and Firefox as the browser on desktop. Any recommendations?

an underappreciated feature in Keepass are URL overrides so you can autorun RDP sessions, SSH sessions, SFTP sessions in other apps with filled in credentials. If Bitwarden had this feature, I'd probably switch.

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#68

Post by jdeibele »

aceazzameen wrote: post #35

I recently switched from LastPass to Bitwarden, and LastPass has the same issue. I had to manually save all my attachments and upload them into their proper place on Bitwarden. It was frustrating, but also not a big deal in my case. Worse things have happened. I wholeheartedly agree that these companies should have a warning that attachments won't export. Because I almost forgot about them.

Thank you for saying something about this. I make up answers to "security" questions like: first pet's name? Favorite teacher? and so on but that means that I have to record what the answer is.

I've been doing that in the notes section for LastPass. I think that I'm going to have to move to doing it in the Notes app since that works on all my Apple devices. And it looks like I can lock one Note without having to lock all of them.

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#69

Post by mdaniel »

manmal wrote: post #55
1una wrote: post #42

> A simple solution would be to b64 encode each file and add it into an array! An individual file attachment can be as large as 500 MB[0]. It would make the JSON file too big to use. Still, I do think that Bitwarden should warn users about it when exporting. Just mentioning it in the Help Center doesn't seem so helpful. [0]: https://bitwarden.com/help/attachments/

Why is such a JSON file too big to use if it’s only ever handled by streaming parsers? SQLite would be a better backup format ofc.

Can you explain how sqlite is a better container for arbitrary binary files than zip?

I mean, I know "INSERT INTO files ('my-file.bin', X'CAFEBABE...')" gets it into sqlite, but how would a sane person get that content back out?

Re: Tell HN: Bitwarden does not export attachments in backups

#70

Post by mdaniel »

jdeibele wrote: post #68
aceazzameen wrote: post #35

I recently switched from LastPass to Bitwarden, and LastPass has the same issue. I had to manually save all my attachments and upload them into their proper place on Bitwarden. It was frustrating, but also not a big deal in my case. Worse things have happened. I wholeheartedly agree that these companies should have a warning that attachments won't export. Because I almost forgot about them.

Thank you for saying something about this. I make up answers to "security" questions like: first pet's name? Favorite teacher? and so on but that means that I have to record what the answer is. I've been doing that in the notes section for LastPass. I think that I'm going to have to move to doing it in the Notes app since that works on all my Apple devices. And it looks like I can lock one Note without having to lock…

In case you haven't already seen it, 1P has effectively a "click button, get fake security question answers" and I love it: https://support.1password.com/generate-security-questions/

They use the "battery horse stable" scheme so you don't have to read crazy ascii over the phone to customer support

Post reply on HN