Some time ago I created a crucially important cred in Bitwarden. It is now not in my vault when I need it most. It has been a disaster for me, resulting in financial and data loss as this is not a password that can simply be recovered.
I have often wondered why a cred would disappear. I create and save creds religiously as I am in solution architecture. How could it be?
Since this issue I have had several others disappear - thankfully they were ones for services I could recover or reset.
Today I figured it out. It is a UX issue (leading to user error). This happened to me just now and I caught myself in the act, went back to the vault, and sure enough, my credential I had just set up was gone.
I use the Firefox plugin. When you click on the plus (“add item”) to create a new cred, then populate cred fields such as username, and to generate a password. If you copied the password, for example, to a CLI/terminal off screen, after setting up all other fields… the “add item” window disappears silently without saving anything! It’s not obvious in the workflow that you are now without any record of the credential. Yes PW gen tool keeps a history but it will be long gone when you need it if you didn’t immediately notice.
Bitwarden should either auto-save the current state of the cred, or leave the window open, and not just silently close. Otherwise, in its current state, it requires the user to remember that this will happen / has happened. But users are busy, and forget. It feels like your workflow has finished at this point.
It’s not enough to expect the user to manually hit save before they click off the window. There needs to be a much better fail safe.
Edit: Lots of edits for terrible grammar. I have covid so brain fingery not working well.