NOTE: 1Password version 2.5 and above uses a new keychain file name — 1Password.keychain (instead of the old 1Passwd.keychain). When you use these instructions with 1Password 2.5+, make sure to substitute 1Passwd with 1Password.
In my last blog entry I discussed how important it is to backup your 1Passwd data and showed how this was done. Backing up our data makes us feel secure and gives us that warm and fuzzy feeling. This time out I am going to walk through restoring your 1Passwd keychain in the event that something were to happen to your primary 1Passwd keychain.
First, a little review of the backup process reminds us that we have up to 62 backups of our 1Passwd keychain on our hard drive. If we have not lost our entire hard drive this is the first place we want to look when the need arises.
Last time we also learned that 1Passwd stores all of your web forms, identities, secure notes, and password history in a file called 1Passwd.keychain. This file is located underneath your User folder. The full path of my file is shown below.
This is the "magic file" that we will want to restore.
Step 1: Exit the main 1Passwd application and Close All Browsers
After all, this is like brain surgery. OK, maybe not, but we need them closed.
Step 2: Rename the existing 1Passwd.keychain file
Just because the existing keychain file is corrupt or not working, I do not recommend that you delete it. No one has ever got themselves in trouble renaming a file. Deleting it is another story. You never hear "Darn, Donna renamed that important document I needed".
Using Finder, navigate to you Keychains folder and rename the 1Passwd.keychain to something like this:
1Passwd.keychain.broken
1Passwd.keychain.old_one
1Passwd.keychain.savingthisoneasitdoesnotworkanywayshouldhavejustdeleteditinsteadoflisteningtothatguy
Step 3: Navigate to the folder that contains your backup files. In the first example, we are going to retrieve one from the backup folder that 1Passwd automatically creates. However, this could be on an external hard drive, USB key, or on your iDisk.
Looking in this folder we see our list of backups:
Generally, you will want to look for the one with the latest date but in some cases you may need to select an older one.
In Finder, click on the item to select it:
Step 4: Copy the backup keychain
Click on the Edit Menu and copy the item:
Step 5: Navigate to your keychains folder again:
Step 6: Paste the backup keychain
Step 7: Rename the backup keychain to 1Passwd.keychain
Click on the file you just pasted until the background changes as shown:
Change the name to 1Passwd.keychain as shown:
Step 8: Start the main 1Passwd application and verify that all your data is present:
The above example shows us restoring from our current hard drive. In my last blog post, we backed up our data to our .Mac iDisk. In the next example, we will recover a file from our iDisk.
We click on our iDisk in the Finder
We navigate to the folder that contains or backups:
Follow Steps 4 - 8 above to restore the backup from the iDisk.
In the final example, we will restore from an external hard drive. We will also assume that we do not remember where the backups are and will search for them.
First, I click on my external hard drive in Finder:
Next, I use the search box to search the drive for all the 1Passwd.keychain files:
Follow Steps 4 - 8 above to restore the backup from the external hard drive.
