Note: The method described in this post is not necessary. Please proceed to the bottom of the post for an easier solution.
Before 1Password I had about three strong password that I used all over the web. It’s not the best practice, but I figured it was good enough. Then I got 1Password and everything changed. The promise of having only one password that I needed to know was amazing and the software works extremely well. I use a strong password generator for any site I register at and if I have my 1Password keychain unlocked all I have to do is right click on the form and click login.
The problem is that 1Password is a Mac/iPhone only application. When I’m at work, the only way I can log into most sites is to look at my iPhone and get the password from there. It’s doable, but is very cumbersome.
That’s why the new release of 1Password 3 had me very excited when 1PasswordAnywhere was included. It allows you to open your Agile Keychain file on any computer and it’s like having all of your passwords just like I was sitting at my Mac.
I’m a recent convert to Dropbox and I love it. The 1PA is a perfect application for Dropbox. I just have to move the file onto my Dropbox and any computer I use now has all my passwords automatically synced to it. It’s still kind of cumbersome to manually move the file so that’s why I now have the beauty of Cron doing that for me.
Fire up Terminal and go into cron with crontab -e and type in the following command:
0 * * * * cp -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain/ ~/Dropbox/1Password.agilekeychain/
This will copy the file to my Dropbox every hour on the hour. I can change it to any timeframe I want, but it’s easy enough and small enough just to do it once an hour.
Update:
Thanks to Mel Matsuoka in the comments for posting it out that you can move the 1PA to anywhere on your computer. Then just open 1Password and it’ll prompt you to either create a new file or locate the existing one. Point it to look in the Dropbox location and you won’t need to mess with the silly cron job.
Great post Ryan. Without a phone to carry around that could have the data stored on it, I’m a little warry of getting random, but very secure, passwords on different sites. So for now I will stick to my current system.
Question: You have to copy the Keychain file because it updates only in once place? So can you only add new passwords from home? And could you set the keychain file to have the destination be in you Dropbox folder thus negating the need to copy it?
1Password puts the .agilekeychain file in a certain location on the computer and can’t be moved, so it looks like the only way to get the file to the Dropbox is either manually or through a scheduled job like I’ve done.
The limitation of 1PasswordAnywhere is that you can only access your passwords from other locations, you can’t add new ones. The only place you can do that is on the computer you have 1Password installed so for me that’d be my primary computer.
There are open source alternatives for Firefox and the likes, but 1Password is the de facto standard on the Mac. After all I’m a Mac living in a Windows world, so I get to do crazy things like move my agile keychain file to my Dropbox.
You can put the .agilekeychain anywhere you want on your computer. You can move it to your DropBox, and either double-click on the agilekeychain file to get 1Password to recognize its new location, or simply open 1Password after moving the keychain, whereupon it will ask you where the keychain is now located.
Thanks Mel Matsuoka for the tip! I’ve updated the post. That solution is much simpler than messing around with a cron job.
Thank you for the write-up, Ryan, and thanks to Mel for providing the easier solution. If you’re interested, we’ve got a guide to synching your 1Password data with Dropbox:
http://help.agile.ws/1Password/dropbox_syncing.html
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Gita Lal
AWS Customer Care
http://agile.ws/support
http://twitter.com/1Password
Gita, I appreciate stopping by and letting us know about your guide. Thanks for making a wonderful product.
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