Thanks to the MacHeist bundle I became a user of 1Password and am, ofcourse, using the companion client for the iPhone too.
There is one thing though that highly annoys me about 1Password syncs. If I update a record in the 1Password app on my computer, say, change the name of the key the next time I sync this change isn’t updated but a “Conflict Copy” appears.
Discard that. Turns out, if you set the same master password in 1Password on your Mac and on your iPhone these issues do not happen. To be honest, it seems like a small bug to me, or something which should at least be checked and mentioned to the user when initializing 1Password on the iPhone.
That is absolutely not what I want to happen or is supposed to happen, the key should just get updated. So I started thinking, how can this be fixed.
The answer is quite simple really. For every entry in the 1Password app there should be a corresponding identifier key (much like an id column in a mysql db). That information, which key goes with which id should also be synced to the phone. Then, when syncing happens, the battle starts. iPhone says:
I have this key with this id and the information in this key was updated on december 26th at 16h00pm
But the Mac says:
I have this key with this id and the information in this key was updated on december 25th a 15h00pm
In that case, that key from the iPhone should override that same key on the Mac. The same idea applies when it is the other way around.
Now there are a few drawbacks to something as simple as an incremental numerical id system, they could overlap each other if you have an id 4 on your desktop and on the go that same day created an entry which got id 4 on your iPhone.
That could sinply be fixed by asking the user for input when a sync conflict occurs but we could also chose a different id system such as the md5, sha1 or base64 signature from when the entry was created which should ensure unique id’s.
I’m sorry for this sync issue; it is definitely some kind of bug as we expect you to have different passwords on the Desktop and iPhone. For example, my Desktop password is very hard to type on an iPhone, so I replaced it with a slightly longer password that was easier to type.
We do in fact have a UUID for each item in 1Password on the iPhone and the Desktop and follow an algorithm similar to yours. Conflicts should only occur when the same item (i.e. matching UUID) is modified on both systems in-between syncs.
Is it possible you edited this item on both the iPhone and Desktop before syncing?
Cheers!
–Dave Teare
Co-author of 1Password
I just kicked 1Password off my phone and set it up again with a different password than my desktop and made it sync again, that works fine.
Then I changed an entry on my desktop and requested another sync from my iphone and boom (steve style), there was the Conflict Copy again.
Strange thing is that the conflict copy always seems to appear when I change the Title of an entry. I can change anything else and it goes fine in general but whenever I change the title it goes haywire.
As far as I can tell the following happens: the mac syncs the new-title-entry to the iPhone but doesn’t update the old entry, instead it syncs a new entry and also syncs the old entry back to my desktop. Which means you end up with 2 entries for the exact same thing (same username, password, location, url etc) except for the Title which is probably what the conflict copy is all about.