So, I’d like to migrate my Bitwarden Vault from the US instance to the EU instance.
I’m just using Bitwarden for my personal passkeys, so there’s no data in my “Organisation”.
So, I’ve had a read through the Guide here and here, but it seems to me like there are a few challenges with the Export and Import approach.
1 - It doesn’t include any attachments.
2 - Does it include the 2FA settings?
3 - Does it include Passkeys? Sounds to me like they are attachments, no?
Has anyone ever tried this migration?
For now, I’m tempted to use the script found here as it covers attachments too, but I’d love to hear of any other suggestion on how to best copy over the vault and it’s data.
Hi Florian, I have not migrated, but here’s what I understand. As an analogy, the migration is more like:
You delete your account, and then create another account, importing an old backup export.
You are migrating from another password manager, except that your passkeys will also be imported.
So, to answer your questions:
It doesn’t include 2FA. You have to set up everything like a new account except what are in your imported vault. Your BW’s 2FA info are not in your vault.
I did this migration a couple of months ago, I would delete the “old” account from the US server only after checking that everything is ok on the EU account and nothing is missing there.
You can keep the account on US server for how long you like.
The two environments (.com and .eu) are completely separate, so there is no need to delete the “old” account until well after you have verified that the data is safely in the new account and everything works as expected.
Two more things that do not migrate with export+import are:
items in the trash (they are not exported)
sends (they are also not included in exports)
And: although today there is the possibility of exporting attachments, there is not the possibility of importing them automatically (they have to be imported to their items manually and one by one).
Getting into the weeds now, but in addition to what you have mentioned already, exports do not include the customized non-default settings for “Autofill on page load?” that may have been configured for individual vault items.
That may be the case, because it only becomes visible (in “Edit” in login items) when you enabled “Autofill on page load” in the Autofill settings of the extension.
The global “Autofill on Page Load” option and the “Default Autofill Settings for Login Items” selection (in Settings > Autofill) are not synced, but apparently the individual customizations are stored in the vault and synced. They are just excluded from JSON exports, for some reason.
Well, I did some tests and it seems to be stored in the vault::
Created a new chromium profile
Installed bitwarden extension and logged in a test account
Changed the Autofill On Page Load (AFOPL) option in the autofill settings
Did an export
Edited an item to set a non-default AFOPL
Did another export
Deleted the Chromium profile
Created a new one
Installed bitwarden extension and logged in a test account
Changed the Autofill On Page Load (AFOPL) option in the autofill settings
Confirmed that the item retained the change of step 5
Did another export
The exported item in all 3 json files were exactly the same (only changing the revisionDate field). That AFOPL field is not there.
Then I logged in the CLI (bw version 2025.12.1).
bw get item does not show any AFOPL field.
But, examining the encrypted vault cache stored in the data.json file one can find the following unencrypted (probably) boolean field:autofillOnPageLoad (that can have the following values: null, true or false (I would guess).
