6 years later and still can't import secure notes?

McVitas · April 20, 2023, 9:47pm

I am listening to Steve Gibson’s Security Now and guess what - I decided to migrate from LastPass to BitWarden. Unfortunately I get a weird error about some note being bigger then 10000 chars. I check the CSV file and it has only couple hundred, so WTH? The message does not give any explanation or advice what to do, so there goes any user friendliness and I have to go crawl the ancient github bugreports in search for answers Found two very old threads

github.com/bitwarden/web

LastPass CSV import fails with secure notes

opened 09:26AM - 17 Apr 17 UTC

closed 06:46PM - 20 Apr 17 UTC

Aculeo

It ends up printing that the password should not be longer than 300 chars. Secur…e Notes have the URL "http://sn", and the content of secure notes in LastPass has no size limit as far as I know, which is stored in the password column. Perhaps it should just ignore that particular URL until Bitwarden can handle notes as well. And one other small issue: Import fails as well when there's empty lines at the beginning of the CSV file. Those empty lines were added automatically when copy/pasting. In my opinion, the importer should be a bit more forgiving there and just ignore them. I had to remove them manually to continue.

github.com/bitwarden/web

Improved error message when importing long notes from Lastpass

opened 06:33PM - 26 Mar 18 UTC

closed 11:59PM - 23 Feb 21 UTC

ssalonen

enhancement

To continue from discussion in the [community forums](https://community.bitwarden.com/t/improved-error-message-when-importing-long-notes-from-lastpass/490/3) Hi all, When importing long notes from lastpass, one might get the following error message ``` Ciphers[390].Notes: The field Notes must be a string with a maximum length of 10000. ``` I understand that such long notes are not meant for bitwarden, see e.g. bitwarden/web#50. However, I would like to request that the UI would show what is the entry 390. It’s quite hard or almost impossible to match the CSV to the entries, especially in the case of multi-line entries like I have. The functionality as designed seem to work as intended, it’s just that the error messages could be better I think -- telling exactly what is the violating entry. Best, Sami

explaining that the note is bigger then 10000chars AFTER the encryption and some ppl put there clever Python scripts as a workaround. That’s all great, but you really think that normal non techy people will have any chance of importing their LastPass vault when there are obstacles like this? Absolutely not! I think it would really be great to stop being lazy and finally fix the import functionality to be able to work with secure notes OR at least give a clear instructions what to do about this! It can also be an apology that these notes just cannot be imported, but they can be skipped and the rest of items would import. Can someone please code this? These bug reports are many years old!

McVitas · April 20, 2023, 9:52pm

If I try to add the same secure note via the desktop app IT WORKS without any error, so I don’t see any reason why it can’t be imported from the CSV file.

cksapp · April 21, 2023, 2:40am

Which desktop app did you try that this worked on? Did you simply copy the plain text into a secure note on the desktop app, or did you mean you did this with the desktop app being the Bitwarden Importer Tool?

McVitas · April 21, 2023, 8:57am

I was following Import Data from LastPass guide. There is no mention of this tool, so I didn’t know it exists. I just copied the text of that one secure note from that Lastpass CSV export which was mentioned in the error and pasted it as a new secure note into standard Bitwarden Windows app without problem. Let me see if this importer works any different then the Web vault…

McVitas · April 21, 2023, 9:09am

So I have installed the importer tool and it worked! My whole LastPass vault was imported without any issue, so thanks for the suggestion! Seems like it uses different algorithm then the Web vault.
So I suggest the devs to do the following:

fix the web vault import functionality and until it’s done point people to this desktop app
correct the Field size import errors paragraph in the guide because it’s confusing. My note was only about 450characters and it triggered the error. It’s not possible to shrink that one anymore without losing information.