Massive Self-Managed Screw UP

magort

I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro (the L7), which required a fairly large amount of reconfiguration of seven other Macs in our household). In the process, I took an original MacBook Air and made it into a family machine available in the family room. Thinking ahead, even if not very coherently, I decided to erase most passwords and all credit card / bank account information from it (two teenagers in the house).



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[*]I use Dropbox and Password's key chain to synchronize machines.

[*]I thought I has both deleted and disabled Dropbox on that machine before beginning;

[*]Alas, I had not and now have lost hundreds of logins and all of my credit card / banking information. The latter is minor, I can just reenter. The former will require dozens of hous of working with customer support to regain web access to all of my sites.

[*]Unfortunately, the new MBP was running Time Machine for too little time to capture all of the logins.

[*]I have recovered the Agile Password from time machine on my prior work machine. When installed, it reports an error that is not in English (or any other known language) but seems to translate into "you are screwed".

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Any ideas?

DBrown

You should be able to restore a backup of your 1Password data file. You have lots of backups (1Password by default automatically creates one each day), and you can restore them directly within 1Password.



From the File menu, choose Restore Data File from Backup. The most recent file is listed at the top; its filename will include the backup date and the number of backed up items.



I hope that helps, magort. Please let us know how it goes.

magort

After trying about 10 key chains, I found one that worked. Any suggestions to avoid problem in future (other than not making a massive screw up!)



--Mike



Michael A. Gort

Gort Law Firm

Jupiter, FL



Thanks to all of you who keep this list alive. All comments made by me are for discussion only among legal professionals, and do not constitute legal advice.

[Deleted User]

Hi Mike,



Glad you were able to restore a backup in the end. I can't think of anything that should be causing your backups to be corrupted, it might be worth checking your drive within Disk Utility to make sure there are no errors. One other thing to note, and this why I love the service, but Dropbox does keep a backup of any deleted files for 30 days, so you would have been able to go to the Dropbox web service and undelete the 1Password.agilekeychain file, or folder as the web interface would have shown it.



Hope that helps,

hexley

Also remember, 1Password saves backups for you, but so does DropBox, whatever you accidentally deleted in DropBox, you should be able to login to the web baed admin, and get back. Just select the menu icon for DropBox and choose "Launch DropBox WebSite", navigate to where your files used to be, in your case, you probably are looking for "1Password" as a directory name. If you don't see it right away, fear not, and click the "Show Deleted Files" button. This will show you, in a light grey color, the old files. From there, it should be a few more logical clicks to restore your files.



I would be inclined to quit DropBox on other machines or perhaps even unlink them until you get your data sorted out and in a safe state. Maybe you also have a TimeMachine backup, or some other backup that could help you out.



Good luck, hope you get your data back.