Filed under: Software, TUAW Tips
Slim your 1Password 3 Backups
1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs.
The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the backups area. I'm not usually one to comment on such things, but we weren't talking about "love handles," 1Password's backups had gone from 1MB to 21MB literally overnight. On August 28th, the backups were 1MB, and on August 29th, the backups were suddenly 21MB.
Wait? Did you say August 28th? Isn't that when Snow Leopard was released? Yes it was. And wasn't that when you switched from 1Password version 2 to 1Password version 3? Yes it was. Could that have something to do with it?
I contacted 1Password's excellent support staff who correctly diagnosed that the increase was related to the preview images which are used for Login and Software License icons. (These can be found in the 1Password.agilekeychain/a/default/thumb folder.) Each preview image take about 100K. With 600+ items in my agilekeychain, this quickly added up.
Fortunately, this is easily fixed. If disk space is a concern, the icons and previews can be deleted using 1Password > Preferences > General > Remove all icons and previews. I also unchecked the box next to "Automatically download icons and previews for new Logins." After I did that, the backup size went from 21.5MB to 889KB!
Why worry about space with today's hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus <1MB. Personally I neither use nor need the icons, so it's no loss to me, and it makes a big difference.
Many thanks to the 1Password folks for helping me get to the bottom of this mystery!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alexander said 1:50PM on 9-26-2009
WOW! thanks for sharing. I'd the same problem. But my thing is that I share the 1Password library over MobileMe, and sometimes it's really slow to sync. Now it's much better, I think so!!! Thanks.
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George said 1:59PM on 9-26-2009
Yikes, they need to fix this on their end. A jump from 1MB to 20MB is pretty drastic.
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tukan said 2:06PM on 9-26-2009
thanks for the tip - I knew what caused the backup size to jump, but this post reminded me that I don't really need the icons/previews, especially that most of them don't look that good
my only problem is that after I deleted all the previews, my backup size went down from 24MB to 9MB. It's a great improvement, but before 1Pwd3, my backups were less than 512KB! Anyone knows what might have caused the backup size not to go back to its original value?
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Slevin said 2:33PM on 9-26-2009
Thanks for the tip... I've got like 1gig of backups from 1P, this will save some space
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Aaron Harpole said 2:37PM on 9-26-2009
Actually, you probably aren't uploading 21 megs of data. One of the awesome things about Dropbox is that it segments your files into tiny chunks, and only uploads the chunks it needs to. So if you make a tiny change to a 100 meg file, you usually only upload a little bit. This is also nifty if you stick a file on Dropbox that someone else has also put on their Dropbox. If, say, you put the 1Passwd dmg file on your Dropbox and then I did the same thing, it would immediately just be there; Dropbox just stores the file once, then keeps track of all the people who have it.
Neat, huh?
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tukan said 2:44PM on 9-26-2009
while it might be true if you use Dropbox for syncing one keychain file between computers, we are talking here also about storing keychain backups - which are independently created files, with different names etc. - they do take some time to sync back to Dropbox.
Niels said 2:57PM on 9-26-2009
You most likely are only syncing the main 1Password data file to Dropbox. Seeing this is a bundle instead of a single file, it'll only sync changed content.
Also you can limit the amount of backups 1Password keeps in Preferences --> Backup
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Brian said 9:10PM on 9-28-2009
Excellent point. I'm wondering if:
A) people are syncing their 1password backups to dropbox as well as data files, or
B) they are not understanding how 1password syncing works with Dropbox. It will only upload or download the files for the logins that changed.
By default 1password does not save backups in the keychain file, so they shouldn't be synced to your Dropbox unless you changed the location. This seems like a non-issue to me.
Dustin N. said 3:32PM on 9-26-2009
Wow, thanks for the tip! My backups were 10MB, went back down to 300K. Freed up 100 MB of space after I deleted the large backups and made a new one after following these steps.
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Gazoobee said 3:48PM on 9-26-2009
No offence but the concept of storing all your passwords in one place so as you don't even know what the passwords specifically are is just plain dumb. Since the beginning of computing this has always been a bad idea and will likely remain so.
Aside from that, it's just so terribly lame of you to actually *care* about 21 MB of hard drive space in today's world. This "tip" reminds me of back in the day when people would give you tips on saving 10 or 12k of DOS memory. A shameful waste of time at best, or perhaps just obsessive compulsiveness?
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mattprice91 said 4:43PM on 9-26-2009
Congratulations on not reading the article: "Why worry about space with today's hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus
Mardi said 1:21AM on 9-27-2009
Just to play devil's advocate, why bother to back up if you're syncing 1Password with Dropbox?
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James said 5:35PM on 9-27-2009
Very good point... I was wondering the same thing. Also wonder why you/me/we would bother with the graphic icons to begin with. I don't know about anyone else, but I rarely if ever actually launch the 1Password app itself - just use the browser integration.
Eric Swan said 1:20AM on 9-27-2009
Gimme!!!
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