There are a lot of old accounts that I own that I don’t plan on every using again. However, I want to keep them in my database in the off-chance I’ll need to access it at a random time. The problem is, it tends to clutter my search results and account lists.
At this point I have hundreds of accounts in my vault, and the ability to archive old accounts would be very useful. Basically not deleting the accounts, but moving them out of the way so they aren’t accessed as easily as my regular, active accounts.
If I wanted to access an account that has been archived, I would have to choose a separate category or folder just to see them, for example.
As you already hinted at: why not simply create a folder named “Archived items” and place all those accounts in it? That way access would simply mean opening the folder and selecting the needed item. At other times they are out of the way and no clutter to speak of.
Likewise I, too, have old accounts and passwords for sites that I do not ever want to be filled when logging in, but I keep them around because they are terrifically useful for when I get those lovely blackmail scam emails that mention old passwords. I am then able to attribute the leaked password.
The Ability to Archive old items would be nice. I also am looking for a way to achieve this. As mentioned above creating an Archive folder is an option but the “archived items” will still be showing up in the All items section and as mentioned in the search.
The only useful option I could think of is to move the archived items to another vault (account).
i had a similar situation as OP and used the advice provided here to address it. in doing some significant cleaning and re-arranging of my vault i was looking at the uri matching rules available per uri entry on a record. if you set the matching rule to never, the record will not appear in the tab page of the browser extension, making them disappear from the auto-fill options when attempting to login to a specific site.
coupled with advanced search queries (https://bitwarden.com/help/article/searching-vault) you can with relative ease eliminate the “archived” records from most views and searches, without deleting or otherwise removing them from your vault.
example i have an old reddit account i no longer use, but because it had a long life-cycle still contains information that i want to access, so i do not deactivate it. but when i go to reddit i do not want to see it in the list of auto-fill options and if i am searching for something that might share the same username and i want to exclude these from search results i can use the advanced search (’>’ enables this) with the ‘-’ prefix to exclude terms from the search. in my case i use a boolean “archive” field to tag my archived items instead of a folder. but the folder, tag, or including something specific in the “name” field would work. the search then becomes >[search criteria] -[archive indicator] ex: >reddit -archive returns all my records that include “reddit” unless they also include “archive”.
as long as you are careful you could probably find a single character, or very short sequence of them, to tag your archived items so you do not have to write out “-archive” in every search you do. update: quick test reveals “#” and “@” to work for this, without interfering with reserved characters in advanced search. so my new scheme will be appending " - archive" to the name, setting uri matching to never, and boolean “@”:true custom field. this will return correct results with “archive” or “>@” and allow easy exclusions from other searches.
i hope this helps others for the interim period before we get true archive functionality.
My misconception was, I could use the Trash for same. Like a two in one. Anyway, as suggested I came to this thread and voted here. For me its not a good option to keep a second account or vault or even another password manager for this. Due to the fact that my job is in IT I have a lot of software, clients, apps, whatever to juggle around with. Our company uses a different password manager, reason unknown and not discussed. Every account and or software I can spare myself matters.
I would suggest better search functionality, as an archival folder is simple to add yourself, and the only real concern here is the passwords showing up in a search. So maybe being able to permanently remove a folder from search results, or being able favorite a set of search parameters thus allowing you to create a folder called Archives, and then bypass it in the search functionality.
A simple toggle setting on each folder creation
Searchable (True/False) is all that needs to be added when a file is created.
And then a simple IF-Then-Else statement can be added to the programming of the search functionality to exclude all in that folder.
You make a good point, technically you could export the passwords to drop box, but that leads to a potential security risk, as well as for some people like @TheMac or the OP it wouldn’t be feasible to have to move the passwords back and forth if they needed them.
But my above post should solve that issue, and be very simple to implement for the devs, while allowing users to create there own archival folders if they so desire.
Yeah, I am doing similar. URI is on “Never” as well but a) my custom filed is called “Old”, b) my names start with [OLD] as I think its easier to distinguish to have it in front and sorts that way and c) I put them into a folder named [OLD].
This is not ideal but I can use > -Old for search. Still I have them lined up in the “All” view. But I understand, as being in the minority of people who sees a need for that, I have to make due with what is there.
My suggestion however, would be: A boolean called “Hidden” (or similar) attached to every data set and those are hidden in all views but in a fixed folder called “Hidden Items”. This could have several uses. Maybe as well I do not want to uncover stuff in my vault if someone should be shoulder surfing?
Another implementation could be to include or exclude specific collections from URI matching. Create a collection called ‘Archive’ to store those items. BW should support a per collection per user setting to show (default) or hide (user setting) that collection for auto-fill.
Sometimes I want to keep a login in my vault, but don’t want it appearing on websites. The only way I can do this right now is to remove URI matching rules, or add spam to the string. Not super important, but if it was faded out in the vault to see it’s archived, it would be helpful.
Using the trash as an archive is too high risk, as I may need it at a far later period (months or even years). Not just a temporary archive. You may ask why I’d need it so long, and the two major reasons are: not needing to recover it, and easily tracking what you’ve had and where.