1password received a 7.8 update this week which silently removed the share sheets functionality in iOS. This was an intended move to force stand-alone license users who use offline local vaults into a cloud-based subscription model where offline vault storage is not available.
I emailed their support and their response is that this was intentional, will not be reverted, and they apologized for not including it in the version notes.
I’m looking into alternative password manager apps now. Feels really bad since 1password has been part of my life for years! But they decided subscriptions are the only way for them to stay in business and that forcing people to store their passwords on their cloud is the best way to force people into perpetual subscriptions since you’ll lose your passwords the moment the subscription is not renewed, unlike the offline vault model where you can still read your passwords from your local file when the sub ends.
I don’t mean to turn this into a license vs subscription thread, I’m sure that horse has been beaten enough, although this is a clear example of a company making anti-customer changes to push people down a subscription path. Removing functionality that was already paid for in the stand alone license to get them to buy a subscription.
This is why I print off, to PDF, a copy of all my passwords from them about once a month, just in case something happens and I loose access. Then I encrypt that PDF and save it to iCloud.
I used 1PW standalone for many years and don’t recall every using its share sheet. But I can understand being miffed when software I use loses a feature. Dave Teare mentioned on the support community blog that one reason 1password.com was created was to facilitate family/business sharing. And that as of earlier this year 97% of their users choose their hosted solution.
DT also writes “. . . we have been toying with the idea of allowing you to host your own instance of our cloud service. It would be your own personal 1Password service that runs entirely on your machine or within your own cloud that you control.”
Whether we like it or not cloud hosted solutions aren’t going away. If you might be interested in a self-hosted solution the survey is at:
be careful with encrypted PDFs … tons of solutions to crack PDFs. Suggest you do double encryption by putting the encrypted PDF in an encrypted file container
I would use veracrypt. Or better yet, use a pair of thumb drives, vercrypt each, and once a week or two, put the password pdf in there and take it to work, family house, or wherever you would go on a regular basis and swap it for the last thumb drive backup. And repeat regularly.
Yes, I saw on their blog they broke compatibility with iOS 12 due to a typo in their code and this simply fixes that typo. The removal of share sheets is still in place. That was a financial decision intentionally to push people into subscriptions.
The 1Password team did an AMA on Reddit yesterday and the top-voted question is about the removal of the share sheet, and there’s a very long answer that explains some of their reasoning.
Purely technically, if you had the PDF on an encrypted disk image on Mac, that should be super-secure…correct? It shouldn’t be practically possible to crack the password on a password-protected DMG?
Why not wait until you have a solution then drop 1Password? I know the Linux community has free options that you can store locally. I’m sure that one of them is cross-compatible.
It depends. As long as you never sync to any cloud providers and you never share them to anyone. If you sync to a cloud provider then you are susceptible for any kind of hacks. As long as the file is hacked removing a password off of a pdf is not that hard with some commercially available products.
on the Mac is definitely more secure than an encrypted PDF somewhere in the Cloud. As @sangadi said there are enough commercial tools out there to crack PDF passwords, hence my advice to put it in an encrypted container/disk image as an extra layer of protection. Better follow @GlitterPony’s advice to use encrypted USB sticks in different locations.
Have been playing with Minimalist and am very happy so far. Good import of 1Password DB, active development roadmap and Apple integration (macOS, iOS and WatchOS).
For now using and evaluating it as a backup solution pending 1Password developments, which clearly go in an undesirable direction
