Another LastPass to bitwarden migration - but with problems

Ask the Community Password Manager
1

Ok, so here in Australia we just got the FU email from LastPass about the downgrade to the free plan. So it was time to check my options and bitwarden seemed to be the winner.

Installed, set up account, exported 2000+ items out of LastPass. However the import bombed about 30 lines deep when it reached the first LastPass “Note”, and there it stopped.

I can see in the export CSV that “Notes” are formatted differently to “Passwords”.

I couldn’t see any mention of how to deal with this in the help article (Import Data from LastPass | Bitwarden Help Center).

I’m guessing this guy (Moving from lastpass to bitwarden) had the same problem.

So now I’m stuck, and don’t really have the bandwidth to figure out what I have to do to the 2000 line CSV when I can just give LastPass US$36.

I’ll hold off for 48 hours because maybe I didn’t find a post that had a workaround, so if anyone has any pointers I’d be glad to hear them.

Cheers
Matt

2

Hi Matt - welcome. Sorry to hear about your import troubles. Can I assume you have seen this help document, which provides some advice on how to deal with Lastpass Notes import errors?

https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/

If you have seen this and it didn’t help, can I ask - how many Notes items are there in your Lastpass vault currently?

3

Hi David,
Yes that is the article I linked in my original post. No, it didn’t help. I don’t have any “errors” per se, it simply stopped importing. It stopped at the first LastPass Note, so I assumed that was the root cause.

I’ve got about 60 notes, but they’re scattered throughout the CSV export from LastPass.

Cheers
Matt

4

Is there anything in the CSV that stands out when you get to the first note? It might just be a formatting issue.

If all else fails, is it possible to export everything except notes from LP, then handle the notes manually?

1 Like
5

That is what I was going to suggest, too. Try removing the notes from the CSV, or at least the first one that causes the problem, and see what happens.

6

It seems obvious what the problem is, the LastPass export CSV has these headers:

url,username,password,totp,extra,name,grouping,fav

The first field is the website URL. On a LastPass Note, the exported data for the URL is always “http://sn”.

Can I manually fix it? Sure. Is it worth the hours of time? I don’t feel like it is. If the import doesn’t cleanly migrate my data from LastPass then its less pain to maintain the status quo.

Unless anyone has a workaround…?

7

Hi Dan, the LastPass export is just “everything”, no options.

9

It should be quite an easy fix - if you’re on Linux, you could use sed 's/http:\/\/sn//g' to remove all the note URLs. On other systems, a find and replace in a plain text editor should do the trick.

I really would recommend giving it a go - Bitwarden is a great product. I’d question why a note in LastPass has a redundant URL entry in the CSV export - I wouldn’t expect another product to cater for anomalies like that, though maybe it’s something the team could take a look at?

1 Like
10

Good suggestion Dan. The other option is to just use a spreadsheet package, like Excel or Google Sheets, to edit the CSV. Sort on the url column to group together every row containing notes, then highlight and cut them out and paste into a new CSV for separate import.

This way, one could have all the passwords imported in less than a minute. I suspect with some CSV Conditioning, it would take almost no effort to import just the notes CSV, also.

1 Like
11

How long are the Notes? I think BW has a small length limit per note. LP is a more mature app than BW, but BW is going to blow it away in a few more updates. Check back in 6 months.