Forgotten password

Hello Folks. I am the original and ligitimate owner of an account with you guys. Bitwarden has been so good for me since I discovered it.

Many months back I felt there might be a security breach and as such I changed my master password. I wrote it down, sadly that did not save me as I no longer remember any other PW with BW other than the one I created my account with: <my_account>@gmail.com.

MY hint maintains that I do know this username/PW combo, sadly the PW was changed (a few months back) as I stated.

This is a great hindrance to me because all my original email addresses had long passwords which where stored with bitwarden.

Could someone direct me how to recover me account?? please.

Hello @Maggi_Mentis - welcome to the Bitwarden community forums, and sorry to hear that you have lost your master password.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Bitwarden has absolutely no knowledge of your password, to ensure strong security and privacy, so there is no way to ‘retrieve’ it if you have lost it. See more in the FAQ here:

You might also find this post helpful:

Regarding self-recovery there are two options, if you have enabled them, that will help. First, if you designated an emergency contact with takeover privileges, they can take over your account and create a new password. Second, if you have created a recent export (backup) of your vault contents, it is possible to create a brand new account and restore your vault data from the backup (note that your password history, items in the trash bin, file attachments, and are not backed up and will be lost).

For future reference, here is an article about best practices for backup up your vault to prevent such issues from happening again in the future:

@Maggi_Mentis This is a public website that anybody can read. Therefore, I would recommend that you edit your post a.s.a.p. to remove the mention of your gmail account. Disclosing that information here will not help any of us solve your problem (we are just users of Bitwarden who provide assistance to other users), but having such personal information openly published on the World Wide Web has the potential to cause you further grief.

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As David already explained, there is no way for you to recover your account (other than you finding the piece of paper where you wrote down your new master password after you changed it).

However, if your chosen password was not very strong, then it may be possible for you (or for someone with the required technical expertise) to break in to your Bitwarden vault. On the other hand, if you chose a strong master password (randomly generated, with sufficient length), as you should have, then there really is no hope other than finding that piece of paper.

Even if your master password was weaker than it should have been, breaking in to your vault will also be extremely difficult unless you have a locally cached copy of your vault stored on a computer. Which client apps do you have installed, and are any of them still logged in? (i.e., if you try to access your vault, does the prompt ask you to unlock your vault, or to log in?) If you find any Bitwarden app that only have to be unlocked, then you may be able to get a copy of the so-called “master password hash” (which is required for any brute-force break-in attempt).

Sorry to read through these threads. If you think about it; I and others would not use a password manager where a lost master password was a hurdle that could easily be bypassed. I hope others reading along here make damn sure they make vault backups and double check their master password is stored somewhere safe.

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and - if they use 2FA (something every Bitwarden user should!) - make sure that they also have added at least a 2nd completely different method like an authenticator app and/or a Yubikey OTP Security Key and/or DUO and/or a FIDO U2F Security Key.

:+1: I can’t imagine being locked out of a vault that holds the “keys to my kingdom”, LOL!