Understanding the "Unfiled" Folder, or "where are my items being stored?"

jasimon9

I am having trouble with the Unfiled Folder. Or more precisely, I am having trouble understanding where the items in my Smart Folders have their underlying storage.



Some time ago I rearranged my folders to use Smart Folders instead of manually moving Logins around. This works quite well for me and I think it is a great feature.



However, I did this some time back, and I cannot see at this time how I was able to achieve the desired arrangement that in fact I achieved before.



Here is a simplistic example of what I achieved before. I created a smart folder to store all Titles that start with "A", another one for "B", and so on. These smart folders therefore maintain themselves as new Logins are added. But I did not finish that work, leaving a few of my actual non-smart folders with items in them. Today I went back to finish the job of creating Smart Folders for them.



So here is the status: the Unfiled folder only had a few newly created Logins in it, there are a few User-created folders with Logins, and the majority of the alphabet had smart folders for Logins starting with a given letter. The Trash folder is also empty. So far so good.



So here is what happens:



(1) I create a new smart folder, and sure enough, it shows the expected items.



(2) Since the Unfiled folder is empty of everything except the most newly created items, I am thinking that I can simply delete the items from the User created folder. I do this, and the items are moved to Trash.



(3) However, when I empty the trash, the underlying Login item is apparently gone, and thus disappears from the Smart Folder as well. So the only way I have to keep the items is to move them back to the Unfiled folder.



This makes sense as the Smart folder is a virtual folder governed by a rule, and the actual Login has to be in some folder. And it seems that if the items are not in a User folder, they have to be in Unfiled (I have even seen this concept explained in another thread).



Except for the fact that all the ones I previously moved into Smart Folders don't exist anywhere either. They appear in the Vault Logins, and in All, but it seems those might be virtual folders too. I cannot figure out where my hundreds of Logins "really" are. I'd like to figure that out, and put all the ones in the remaining User folders "there" too. That is, nowhere but in the Smart Folders (plus of course in Vault under Logins, and the All folder).



But nothing seems to achieve the effect I want, and the effect that I previously achieved in some way.



For the vast number of my Logins, I do not think they are in any "real" folder anymore; they exist simply in the Smart Folders and Login under Vault, plus All. However, they are not in Unfiled, nor are they in Trash.



So where are they? And how do I again achieve this type of organization? I cannot reproduce how I got this to work, but it certainly is working. There is some sequence of operations that has achieved this desirable but seemingly impossible arrangement.



By the way, I have about 300 Logins and 100 Secure Notes. 215 of the Logins are acting how I would like, with "no apparent actual location."



I hope someone can understand what I have written, as I can see it could be confusing.

jxpx777

The short answer is that if an entry is not in a blue folder, it should show in Unfiled. Right now there is a bug in 1Password that can allow an entry to not be in a folder but not show in Unfiled, which sounds like what you've managed to do (without remembering how) and what you would like to replicate. Read on for more information and how to exploit this for fun and profit. :)



Your items physically live on your hard drive as a flat file ending in the .1Password extension inside your 1Password.agilekeychain/data/default folder. For each entry that is a login, secure note, wallet item, account, etc., it can have a folderUuid key. This key associates it with a user-created blue non-smart folder. If that folderUuid key is missing, the entry shows up in Unfiled. This is unavoidable, but I have argued that rather than the Unfiled and All smart folders, which cannot be deleted or changed, we should allow for them to be removed and provide some more useful smart folders like recently created, recently modified, or recently accessed. But, for now, we have All and Unfiled with no way to change that.



I have seen an issue recently with another user that deleted a folder that contained items. When you delete a folder that contains items, it offers to move those items to Unfiled. But, for this particular user, the entries that were in that deleted folder were still associated with that folder by its UUID. For this user, the simple solution was to select all the entries that should have been in Unfiled and drag them there again. Does that sound like how your situation evolved? If you don't want the entry to show in Unfiled, you could in theory exploit this bug. Drag the entries to a blue folder. Then, delete that folder and tell 1Password to move the entries to Unfiled. If my investigation and subsequent understanding are correct, then your entries should not be in any folder except All.



[b]Caveat:[/b] By doing this you're putting your data into an inconsistent state. It's not one that can't be rectified, but you're essentially intentionally orphaning your entries from their folder parents. Also, if we fix this in a future release and, for instance, verify that the folder that an entry points to actually exists, then your entries could start showing up in Unfiled again. So, just keep that in mind and you should be OK. Naturally, be sure that you've got good backups just in case anything gets wonky. :)



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

jasimon9

I should add that there is a reason I like the Unfiled folder to be empty as long as all the Logins are either in a User folder or a Smart Folder. That way, I can easily see which of any new items are not being picked up by a Smart folder. It is a convenient default place for "items I still have to take care of."



If no items were in User folders but all were in Smart folders, then they also should all appear in Unfiled according to your design. In this case the Unfiled folder would essentially duplicate the All folder. This adds no value to me. However, others having different "architectures" will naturally see this differently.



For me it would work perfectly if the "real" folder was the All folder, since everything should be there anyways. Then User folders, Smart Folders, the Unfiled folder, and everything else could all be virtual folders. In fact when I think about this way of doing it, I cannot see any reasons why this should not be the preferred design (except that it is a lot of rework for your team).

Nik

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that besides fixing the bug Jamie mentioned, we can do a lot to improve this. We appreciate your input!

noelbernie

wow, i had been hiding Folders since a few months, and switched completely to Tags.

I had a lot more items in the ALL smart folder tan in the UNFILLED smart folder.



I dragged all the ALL items in the UNFILLED smartfolder and all is now in sync.



FEATURE request --> Display the number of items in a folder, or the number of selected items

Nik

[quote name='noelbernie']FEATURE request --> Display the number of items in a folder, or the number of selected items[/QUOTE]



View > Show Item Counts

jasimon9

[quote name='Jamie']

If you don't want the entry to show in Unfiled, you could in theory exploit this bug. Drag the entries to a blue folder. Then, delete that folder and tell 1Password to move the entries to Unfiled. If my investigation and subsequent understanding are correct, then your entries should not be in any folder except All.

[/QUOTE]





I have come back to revisit this issue. I now have a Unfiled folder with all new logins created since my original post, with one odd exception. There is one login that I created since this time that appears in All, but not in Unfiled. Because of this one exception, there is something really odd going on, because it is inexplicable that there should be an exception.



So I tried your suggestion quoted above to exploit the bug. However, it did not work. After the blue folder was deleted and I selected "move to Unfiled", the item was moved back to Unfiled, leaving me where I started. Actually, that is what I would expect should happen.



Basically, I have an Unfiled folder that seves no purpose, except that I have to have it to retain most newly created logins (other than the exception mentioned above). And I have 27 Smart folders: 26 for logins that start with each letter of the alphabet, plus one more that uses tags to collect items that start with a numeric digit.



I am also wondering if updates to 1P have perhaps changed some of this behavior.

MartyS

Jamie did say upfront that it was a theory. :)



Seriously, I don't know why you're not seeing that item in Unfiled as well. Can you tell: is it a Logins item as well, or something else? I'm sorry but Unfiled cannot be "turned off" even if it has no purpose for your specific uses.

jasimon9

Thanks for your response.



I have a definite mystery then. I have hundreds of logins. Several hundred of them exist only in "All" and in the smart folders. They do not show in Unfiled. For me, filing them in the Smart Folders means that they are Filed, so this is fine. Most of the recent logins do show in Unfiled, so whatever happened in the past, I cannot reproduce.



I don't like the "instability" that is apparently occurring, even though it does give me the functionality that I would prefer. That is, if a "Smart Folder" files the item, consider it "filed."



However, I am thinking of created yet another "dummy" folder to file items in, to get them out of Unfiled. But that just creates yet another "useless" entity.



Probably best just to let it be, with most of the new items going into Unfiled, then I just ignore that folder.

MartyS

[quote name='jasimon9']Thanks for your response.



I have a definite mystery then. I have hundreds of logins. Several hundred of them exist only in "All" and in the smart folders. They do not show in Unfiled. For me, filing them in the Smart Folders means that they are Filed, so this is fine. Most of the recent logins do show in Unfiled, so whatever happened in the past, I cannot reproduce.



I don't like the "instability" that is apparently occurring, even though it does give me the functionality that I would prefer. That is, if a "Smart Folder" files the item, consider it "filed."



However, I am thinking of created yet another "dummy" folder to file items in, to get them out of Unfiled. But that just creates yet another "useless" entity.



Probably best just to let it be, with most of the new items going into Unfiled, then I just ignore that folder.[/QUOTE]



While I can understand what you're wanting (not to have to look at Unfiled if you don't really care about it), having an item show up in a Smart Folder listing isn't the same operation as filing it there: it could be there one day and then not the next based on a data change or a change in the Smart Folder criteria. We still think that [I]something[/I] like Unfiled plays an important role for many customers. The decision we have is whether we leave it as a hard-wired listing in the sidebar, provide a preference option for it, or provide a means for a Smart Folder selection rule to find anything that isn't in a named folder (or in your situation... doesn't match the criteria of any of the existing Smart Folders). We're still pondering the next best move.

jasimon9

[quote name='MartyS']While I can understand what you're wanting (not to have to look at Unfiled if you don't really care about it), having an item show up in a Smart Folder listing isn't the same operation as filing it there: it could be there one day and then not the next based on a data change or a change in the Smart Folder criteria. We still think that [I]something[/I] like Unfiled plays an important role for many customers. The decision we have is whether we leave it as a hard-wired listing in the sidebar, provide a preference option for it, or provide a means for a Smart Folder selection rule to find anything that isn't in a named folder (or in your situation... doesn't match the criteria of any of the existing Smart Folders). We're still pondering the next best move.[/QUOTE]



Here is an alternate solution, which I proposed in my second posting above:



For me it would work perfectly if the "real" folder was the "All" folder, since everything should be there anyways. Then User folders, Smart Folders, the "Unfiled" folder, and everything else could all be virtual folders. In fact when I think about this way of doing it, I cannot see any reasons why this should not be the preferred design (except that it is a lot of rework for your team).



That is, make the All folder not a smart folder, but the only real folder. All others are virtual. At that point, "Unfiled" could be a smart folder as you suggest, with its "rule" being "anything not in any other folder" (which I agree, could be a bit tricky to implement).

MartyS

Thank you for the additional thoughts on the subject. I cannot promise that something like this will be changed but we're not 100% happy with the present implementation either. With our Search "Everywhere" there may not be a need for any folders to be shown unless the user has created them. As Search gets more intelligent we'll just have to see where this all leads.

[Deleted User]

[quote name='Jamie' timestamp='1271082100' post='1274']

Right now there is a bug in 1Password that can allow an entry to not be in a folder but not show in Unfiled, …[/quote]

And that bug still exists in 3.5.3.



The reason for differences in Unfiled item counts on similarly (not identically) "synched" systems was puzzling me until discovering this topic. Now I understand it, and also why All and Unfiled counts differ even though those are the only two folders on each system. It's certainly misleading and counterintuitive to me that items not in some [i]other[/i] folder(s), regular and/or smart, may not always and consistently appear in Unfiled. Until this issue is resolved I'm satisfied simply ignoring Unfiled instead of trying to predict and rely on its current behavior. Seeing the total item count displayed for All makes that folder useful; otherwise I'd disable Folders under [b]Display in Sidebar[/b] in Preferences > General to hide Unfiled.



Thanks for the helpfully thorough explanations and ideas here.