I switched to Bitwarden from LastPass, and I have apparently missed something basic. I populated the vault with the passwords from LP, but almost none of them ever actually get entered as I log in to a site. What happens is that I have to go to the vault and manually copy the password – and after I paste it in, and log in, Bitwarden asks if it should remember the password. When I say yes, it creates a new entry in the vault. It’s identical to the old one, but neither actually works; next time I log into that site Bitwarden will do the same thing, leaving me with three nonfunctioning entries in the vault. I’ve clearly done something wrong at the outset, but I cannot see what it is – nor can I see where in this forum is the place to ask a dumb question like this one. I’d appreciate suggestions, before I abandon Bitwarden and try another, less highly recommended, password keeper.
– Russ
Which browser are you using? on which platform?
@Russ08 Welcome to the forum!
What you are doing is definitely not the way you are supposed to work with Bitwarden.
It seems that there are a few potential issues occurring at the same time, so we’ll have to try to tease out what is going on with your setup.
The first possibility is that data did not get properly imported from Lastpass (either because there was an issue with the Lastpass export itself, which has been known to happen, or because there was some problem with the way that Bitwarden imported your Lastpass export).
Second, there could be some issue with the way that your apps are configured, or even something as simple as not having your vault unlocked.
For now, I would strongly suggest that you stop doing what you’ve been doing (which clearly isn’t working). If you have already created so many duplicate entries in your vault that they cannot be manually deleted, you may want to consider purging your vault contents and starting over by re-importing your original Lastpass export. You can do this in the Web Vault — let me know if you need assistance.
Also, you have tagged this post app:desktop, but based on clues in your comments, I am guessing that you have not only installed the Bitwarden Desktop app (bitwarden.exe), but also a Bitwarden browser extension. As @DoctorB noted, it would help if you let us know what browser and operating system you are using.
I am also going to guess that your problems may in part be due to misconceptions about how the different Bitwarden apps and browser extensions work together, and how the vaults behave in their three states of operation (logged out, locked, and unlocked).
To prevent problems, start by going to the Settings Section of your browser extension, and make the following changes:
- Set the “Vault Timeout” to a value that is neither too long (which creates security vulnerabilties) nor too short (which creates inconveniences); I would suggest 5, 15, or 30 min.
- Set the “Vault Timeout Action” to Lock.
- Click the Options link, and check the checkbox for “Show badge counter”; I would also recommend that you uncheck the two options “Ask to add login” and “Ask to update existing login”. You can come back and modify the other settings to your liking, after you have achieved some basic functionality.
Next, go to a website for which you have an (imported) account stored in Bitwarden, but one that you have not already created duplicate entries for (using the process you described in your post). Before doing anything else, look at the Bitwarden extension’s shield icon at the top of your browser. Do you see a little number superimposed in the lower right corner of the icon, as shown below?
If not, then your data did not get transferred correctly from Lastpass to Bitwarden.
I’ll await your response, then I can try to help you with further troubleshooting after we have a better idea of what is going on with your system.
Yes, it’s becoming clear that I’m not working the way I’m supposed to. I had no trouble with LastPass, so I assumed I could figure this out. I was wrong.
I think the data from LastPass was imported ok, because the vault listings look consistent with what I had on LastPass.
I don’t think the problem is a locked vault; since I began with Bitwarden, I’ve had to enter my master password pretty well every time I used it, but yesterday I found out how to unlock it so that when I click the desktop icon it immediately displays the vault. I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong way to use it, but it’s allowed to enter passwords without retypying the master password every time I log into anything.
I don’t have so many duplicates I can’t manually delete them; in fact I’ve been doing that as I go – and I stopped answering yes to the question, do you want Bitwarden to rememember this password? once I realized it was creating a duplicate entry each time.
Yes, I’ve installed both the Desktop and the browser extension. I’m running Chrome on Windows 10.
Your guess about my misconceptions is pretty accurate. I’m going to try your suggestions (maybe in the morning, when I’m not just arriving home from a long meeting). Thank you for your thoughtful response.
Did you follow all of the instructions in my comment above, and if so, did you see the number on the extension icon?
I’ll let you know in the morning. Grateful for the suggestions.
I’ve done all that. And you’re correct, there’s no tiny number on the bitwarden shield on either of the sites I’ve checked. My guess is that I should be going back to square one with the import from LastPass? A problem I anticipate there is that LastPass is still on my system, but I’ve not been updating it since importing Bitwarden, so many passwords there will not be current.
Let’s figure out the source of the problem first.
In the Bitwarden browser extension, open one of the vault items that doesn’t work, and click the Edit button at the top right. Look in the space just below the Authenticator key (OTP) field (which itself is just below the Password field) and just above the Folder field. Do you see there any field that is labeled URI 1, similar to what is shown in the screenshot below?
If you you do see a URI 1 field, please copy the entire text string contained in that field, and paste it into your response.
Alternatively, you may find that there is no URI 1 field in the space between the Authenticator key (OTP) field and the Folder field, and that the only thing there is a link that says + New URI, as shown below:
If so, please let me know that this is the case.
What I have there is
Don’t know if you can see that, but it says “Auto-fill on page load (if set up in Options)” and under that in the box, “Use default setting”.
Yes, thank you for posting that screenshot. I had forgotten that the “Auto-fill on page load” option may be there, as well (because this is an option that I do not have enabled, for security reasons). In any case, this auto-fill setting is irrelevant for the current purposes of troubleshooting the issues with your vault items.
Unfortunately, your screenshot is cut-off, as the important information that I need to see is whether there is any URI 1 field just above where it says + New URI.
There’s nothing in there. Here’s the whole thing.
[Screen shot redacted by mod.]
To protect your privacy, I replaced your screenshot with a redacted version that does not show your email address.
The fact that the URI 1 field is absent means that the website addresses for your online accounts were not properly transferred from your Lastpass account into your Bitwarden vault.
Do you still have the file that you exported from Lastpass (and imported into Bitwarden), and if so, can you check whether it contains any website addresses? For example, does the exported information for your Air Canada account contain any web address similar to https://www.aircanada.com/clogin/pages/login or perhaps just https://www.aircanada.com/?
Thanks for noticing the email address.
If the file would have been named export.csv, I don’t still have it.
I’m surprised that there’s a problem, because as I remember it (it was some weeks ago) the process was pretty straightforward, and as far as I can tell all the items from the LastPass vault are now there in the Bitwarden one, with web addresses, logon ids, and passwords.
Looking back at the aircanada.com item, it lists Name as aircanada.com, Username as my email, and Password as masked but can be uncovered by clicking the eyecon.
I have never used LastPass, but the screenshot shown below suggests that they do store a “URL” string, which is different from the “Name” of the item:
Perhaps you never saved any URL values when you were using Lastpass, and only used the “Name” field to identify the website associated with each account.
To diagnose this further, and to develop a solution for your case, it would help if you could create a new .csv export from your Lastpass vault, then copy the first row of the .csv file data (which should have field names only) and paste that information into a response here.
Took me a while, because I couldn’t remember how I’d imported the LastPass data. I recreated it by following their promps, and I suspect that what I did was directly replace the information in Bitwarden (I’m not sure, but I’d expected a prompt to save or download a file, and didn’t get one). So I went back to LastPass and followed the directions for exporting to a csv file; what I was a display of a file on hte lastpass site – export.php, whose first is this:
url,username,password,totp,extra,name,grouping,fav
But I also got as a download a file that looks incomplete, named lastpass_vault_export.csv, which has only 13 lines in it. The first line same headers, and in the url column are full urls, e.g. http://frederictonartsalliance.ca/
I hope this tells you something helpful . . . and I hope I haven’t reverted my bitwarden vault back to the current state of the LastPass one.
Nobody said anything about importing your Lastpass data. I had asked you to export your Lastpass data.
Whose prompts? What prompts did you follow?
If you followed my instructions to create a new Lastpass export, and did not subsequently log in to the Bitwarden Web Vault to attempt to perform any importing tasks (something I had not advised you to do), then your Bitwarden vault should remain unchanged.
How many accounts do you have stored in the Lastpass vault? Just 12?
You may need to find a support forum for Lastpass to get help with exporting Lastpass data. Here is a help article from Lastpass that has the instructions for exporting a .csv file from their browser extension (please note that the instructions differ depending on whether your Lastpass version is earlier or later than version 4.104.0):
Export vault data from LastPass as a generic CSV file
Here are Bitwarden’s instructions for how to export your Lastpass data:
Note: I am concerned that instead of creating an export of your Lastpass data as requested, you may have used the option in Bitwarden’s browser extension or Desktop app to Import Data and done a “direct import” of your Lastpass vault contents into your Bitwarden vault. If this is what you did, then you will have create duplicate items of everything in your vault. In this case, it may become very difficult to find any changes or additions that you made since your original import.
Sorry, as 
I’ve run out of room for posting and have been shut out for three hours. It’s clear that I did mistakenly reimport all the listings from LastPass and create duplicates. My guess is I’m going to have to go back and start over. I’m done for a while. Thanks for your patience.
@JaiBitwarden Would you mind elevating @Russ08’s forum trust level to relax some of the rate limiting restrictions? And you can probably delete the @Russell8 account, since it was created just to circumvent the posting limit.
@Russ08 As this is a public forum, it is not a good idea to post your email address (this will invite spam, and possible attempts to hack your Bitwarden account). I have edited your post to delete your email address.
If you have a lot of new or updated passwords in your Bitwarden vault, then these would be lost if you truly start over by purging the contents of your vault. If that’s what you want to do, I can assist you with getting restarted. However, if you want to try to preserve the changes that you’ve made, then we could make an attempt at that; however, there is no simple technique to do this, unless you happen to know exactly which of your accounts have been updated in Bitwarden. I can do my best to attempt to help you locate the updated entries if you don’t know which ones have been changed since the original import.