Well I am having a little difficulty in getting my attachments back on this one item. These attachments have been successfully saved over a year ago.
Are they lost forever?
Other vault items are OK. I think this was just a bad edit on my phone (but maybe not).
Implies that whenever one saves an item with attachments then one is at risk of losing the attachments. Wonder if that’s true.
@DoctorB There is an open GitHub issue to that I think (and probably best, to add your details in there as well):
This seems to be a “follow-up” on the server side:
PS: I added “(error: cannot decrypt)” to the title, to make the issue a bit more obvious.
The error message is described in the Help Center, but the documentation states that this error only applies to attachments uploaded prior to December, 2018. If your attachments are more recent, then the bug reports referenced above most likely apply to you.
For anybody seeing the warning about “old file attachments” for files that are indeed old (uploaded prior to December, 2018), you should follow these instructions from the Help Center.
@DoctorB Could you confirm when you made the edit to these items that resulted in the state that you find your attachments in? / When the last time you were able to access them is? And, if possible, also when you created the vault item.
@Quexten
The vault item was created Jan 2023.
I think I uploaded the attachments during 2024 but can’t be 100%.
I edited the vault item (an identity) during June 2024 and I recall having a little trouble but certainly did not change the attachments at that time.
I assumed the attachments are stored seperately to the vault items and an edit of the vault item would not affect the attachments but it may be that saving the item also saves the attachments even if they haven’t been changed.
Any how I deleted the attachments and saved the vault item. Then when adding the attachments back the windows desktop app gives the following error but does successfully add the attachment.
The extension in Brave saves and deletes and downloads the same attachment so may be just an isue with the windows desktop app (2025.7.0)
PS Yes the Windows desktop app is giving that error when I add an attachment to other items as well so looks like a bug in Win desktop app. (when I save the item after having added an attachment)
A few weeks back, I discovered corrupted file attachments that I will have to manually recreate the images that I had attached. I have no idea if any of my other thousands of entries I have had their attachments corrupted. So, I already feel like I cannot trust BitWarden too much.
I would gladly download an encrypted backup copy of my entire BitWarden vault (like LastPass used to offer) if BitWarden offered such a thing. In my case, it would be simply to have an encrypted (hopefully good/un-corrupted) copy of my data stored in BitWarden.
To be clear, I created my BitWarden account in January 2023, but none of these attachments that I saw getting the “error: cannot decrypt" error message were that old. They were from Fall/Winter 2024 and/or early 2025. In this case, I had many entries where I performed tasks on my Windows PC and attached image files to those entries via the Brave BitWarden extension. I would then sync the changes, go to my phone, sync the changes and download the attachments to my phone and used them. Hence, in my case, I KNOW all of these attachments (all tiny images I needed on my phone) were initially fine and synced… the corruption happened later at some point.
Perhaps @Quexten can shed some light on this (evidently recent) issue. It might be helpful if you are able to provide as many of the details as possible from his previous request for information:
You can certainly download an encrypted export of the vault data except for file attachments (and also excluding the trash folder and any Sends in your vault). There is an export option (.zip format) that does include a copy of all file attachments, but it is not encrypted. You could use a third-party solution like VeraCrypt to download the .zip export into an encrypted container, or you could unzip the .zip export, and re-zip it with password protection.
There was a bug present around April-May 2025 that would result in permanent loss data for very specific vault items, that were created on specific versions of the app / during a specific time period in early-mid 2024, (and a little bit longer for mobile clients). The bug resulted in the per-attachment-key becoming un-decryptable as the per-vault-item key used to encrypt the per-attachment-key was deleted, without updating the per-attachment-key to replace it with a new copy. It was triggered by editing these vault items during the above period on a web, desktop, or browser client. It has since been fixed, but data affected by this is irrecoverable since the encryption keys are gone.
If customers noticed this within a short period of time, their data could be restored from backup, though, at this point they are not recoverable.
There is ongoing efforts to increase validation of encryption-related changes, both on the clients and server side so that these bugs cannot be introduced again in the future.
