Moving items from a collection to a folder

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1

I am new to Bitwarden and imported data from Lastpass; all of which went into collections. I then noticed that collections are used to share items with different users in the same organisation. So I set up some folder to keep items that I do not want to share.

I tried to move items from a collection to a new folder that I created. When I selected all the items and the folder to move these to, I got the message that the items were moved successfully. However, the were now showing both in the folder as well as still in the collection. When I deleted them from the collection, they disappeared from my vault altogether! What is going on?

And why is Bitwarden not clearer by having “Personal folders” and “Shared Collections” to show the difference?

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Hey Ron, think of folders like tags (in a future version of Bitwarden they will be renamed as such) folders are just a way to organize your personal view and may include everything you have access to from your individual vault and organization collections.

If you log into the web vault you can see in the vaults tab whether items are in your individual vault or the organization vault.

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G’day. I’m new and hope this intrusion is OK.
I think you have the answer I’m looking for, but I need some clarification please.
What does "you can side in the vaults tab " mean or how do I do it?
Each time I select an entry from the vault, it opens and there is not opportunity to select another for a joint move to a new folder.
Any help very much appreciated.
Cmjh

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Corrected the typo, from the vaults screen in the web vault you can see a highlighted indicator on the right side to see who owns the item, your individual vault, or the organization.

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Ah so…
Is there any way to " select " multiple items from one folder (where all my LastPass items got dumped in one folder) and put them in newly named folders? I can do it one at a time, but …
So for example, is there a way to select both USAir and Delta sign-ons and move them both at the same time (along with other travel related signons) to a newly created folder called Travel? It sure is tedious doing this selection and folder match xfer one-by-one…
Thanks for any help. I can see I’m not the only one asking for this, but the others don’t seem to have received satisfactory answers, so maybe it’s just not possible. If so, please warn me.

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Hi dwbit. I appreciate your quick reply. As a new individual user trying to set up a family account for me and my partner, I must say that BitWarden is a lot more complex / confusing than LastPass which we have been using. Having organisation collections may make more sense for business users.

I also got a response from your support people to explain that folders are for personal vaults, whereas collections are for organisational vaults. Which still does not make sense to me. What should I use for myself and my partner? Would I use the personal vault for items that only I want to see, and collections for shared items?

What does not make sense either is that Bitwarden allows me to move items from a collection to a folder in my vault. Which looks more like a copy as after the move the original item is still in the collection. But when I delete that item from the collection, it also deletes it from my vault. Yikes!

I read in a review of top password managers that Bitwarden is solid but difficult to use. I definitely agree. I am still very close to ditching it and going back to Lastpass.

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@Cmjh You’ve asked the same question in at least three different threads. I have posted an answer here — or you can refer to the Help documentation.

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Sorry to hear things aren’t going as easily as hoped. I too moved from LastPass with many shared entries there with a partner. The transition has been worth it and ultimately resulted in cleaning up a lot of cruft.

In family/household cases such as yours, it’s typical to have each of the following:

  • Your personal vault (only your own personal stuff - i.e. not shared)
  • A family organization (which will have its own vault - i.e. stuff shared with a partner)
  • The family vault (only shared stuff - i.e. the vault associated with the family organization)

Key bits to remember:

  • You own the items in your personal vault.
  • The organization owns the items in its vault.
  • Generally you’ll be the admin of your organization vault in a family situation

Items in your personal vault can be moved to the family organization’s vault - if you wish to share them (in fact it is the only way to do so). At that point those items belong to the organization, but are otherwise generally accessed/managed from your individual perspective in the same way as non-organization items.

Collections are a way to organize organization vault items, For families the needs are minimal typically. For example, we (our household) primarily uses the “Default Collection” which is just a catch-all.

Folders are a way to organize any items you as an individual have access to (i.e. items visible to your individual account regardless of whether located in personal or organizational vaults). Folders - regardless of where the item is actually from/stored - are only visible within your individual account (i.e. even those with access to the same items will not see your folder structure involving those items).

Additional tidbits:

  • Folders aren’t required
  • Collections are only required in so much as at least one must exist as a “default” within an organization’s vault
  • Collections primarily exist so that it is possible to have things like a “Parents Only” collection or an “Everybody Including the Kids” collection within an organization (but that’s a more advanced topic so try not to get hung up on it at the moment!)
  • Items in organization vaults may be placed inside of folders by an individual user. In reality, this doesn’t move the item anywhere - nor change where the item is located from the perspective of any other user in the same organization - so “place” is probably the wrong word - but the real issue is folders should be renamed to tags which it sounds like is happening.
  • It’s really easy to move things from your personal vault to the organization vault, but if you want to “move” stuff from the organization vault (i.e. to unshare it or take ownership of the item) you’ll need take an extra step: clone the item (from the organization) then make yourself the owner of the newly cloned item (rather than the organization). At that point you can nuke the item still owned by the organization.
  • Most people - in my observation at least - seem to find it easiest to do all their initial organization of things via the web client (https://vault.bitwarden.com)

Really useful resources:

P.S. I’m a bit baffled by how you ended up with the import going directly into a collection within an org/family vault rather than into your own personal vault - I don’t recall a direct collection/org vault import being possible with a conventional import from the web interface, but I haven’t performed an import in a few months so I might be remembering wrong.

The main issue with the LastPass → Bitwarden transition I recall having was with what initially seemed to be duplicates, but these weren’t the fault of any bug or mistake: When importing our respective exports from LastPass there is no concept of shared items within the LP export because we had numerous individually shared items with each other. Each of our respective imports into Bitwarden had these entries, which were naturally the first items we moved into our shared organization since they were all shared. But since both of our individual imports had these same items there we effectively all copies of each other. Took an extra clean-up step but there wasn’t a good way around this due to the account structures at LastPass and how we’d been sharing things (as individual items) for many years (rather than as a single shared org-level vault or some other similar grouping mechanism).

2 Likes
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Hi Josh, thanks for providing that detailed response and apologies for taking the time in replying. Your information does help to explain the difference between the personal vault items and its folders versus the shared organisation vault item and its collections. It would be nice if Bitwarden would call them “Personal Folders” and “Shared Collections”. And they need to also update their documentation and functionality relating to ‘moving’ items from collections to folders as that still does not make any sense to me and at best seems to be a way to create a link from an item in a collection in a folder.

I must say I am still not sold on Bitwarden because of these issues and don’t see any benefit over LastPass other than the recent security issues they have encountered. I am certainly interested why you feel that the transition for you was worth it.

Kind regards
Ron

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Thank you. I set up my family here a year or two ago and “shared” into the family organization. Now that I want to unshare, i.e. retrieve some of them back into my personal vault, I discovered that I could’nt “move” them back ;-}
… and was being cautious about what and how I just tested ideas, one of which was to export the org; filter for import into the personal; I haven’t tested that yet either. I think I’ll have breakfast first :sunglasses:

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Josh, I have been going around in circles for a week or more (having given up previously) and after reading your note I suddenly get it. Thanks for taking the time, much appreciated!

Alex.

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At this point having done a LOT of reading in Bitwarden help pages, Ability to Clone Item in a Collection, How to Move Multiple Items to a Folder, and several other threads, I find myself either hopelessly confused or perhaps instead missing one crucial piece of the puzzle I face.

History:

About a month ago I set up a family account with a vault for myself, a vault for my wife, and a shared collection. But as a beginner, I didn’t pay enough attention up front on how to group the items in each vault / collection so they could be found without great effort. Now I need to move 7 items from one vault to another, a process that appears to require using the collections mechanism as a way station.

I think I finally understand that what appear to be items are in fact merely labels, with the actual content of an item residing in the Bitwarden cloud repository. And thus to avoid confusion and/or errors, a label needs to exist in only one vault or collection – otherwise if you delete an item (label) it will also be deleted in any other locations where it appears.

Now to the details of my current challenge:

To relocate the seven items I created a new collection (“Holding Tank”) in collections. Then using the ‘Assign to Collection’ mechanism I moved six of the seven items from my vault to the “Holding tank” collection. In what was probably a classic misunderstanding, I cloned one of the 7 files in my vault and moved that clone to the Holding Tank collection, leaving the original item in my vault.

So far, so good. Maybe. The problem is that I can’t find a way to move / copy an item from the “Holding Tank” collection to my wife’s vault. The only option appears to be “Assign to Collections” but what I need to do is in essence, assign to my wife’s vault. My impression from various discussion threads is that if I create clones of the items in the Holding Tank and transfer those to my wife’s Vault, I could delete the originals and they would disappear from both my vault and the Holding Tank collection. But that doesn’t appear to do anything useful, because now I will have clone versions in both the Holding Tank collection and in my wife’s Vault. And anyhow I haven’t found a way to do that, as you’ll see from the following.

Hoping for the best and pressing on:

OK, to Password Manager (and still logged in as myself) where there is an option to select one or more items and then click on “Add to Folder”. But that won’t work because the implied folder is in my Vault, which is the original source of the item. If I go back and log in to Bitwarden as my wife, the admin console isn’t accessible and there doesn’t appear to be any way to move an item from a collection to my wife’s vault.

This process seems remarkably confusing, convoluted and thus far unsuccessful, so I assume I’ve missed a critical piece of understanding and hope you can assist. I could re-create the items from scratch in my wife’s vault and that would have taken a LOT less time than I have invested already, but there MUST be a reasonable approach that doesn’t require recreating an item in a different folder any time you want to move an item from one user to another.

Awaiting your feedback and at this point, hoping I’ll understand it…

Martt

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FYI there is something very strange about the dating of replies. I posted the reply above a few minutes ago on 23 Nov 2024 but it is displayed as 4 months after the previous posting in August 2023.

Martt Harding

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No, vault items are real, distinct records of information (similar to a card in a Rolodex. If anything, it would be the folders and collections that could be considered analogous to “labels”.

Not quite. A copy of the item data is stored locally on each device where you use Bitwarden, in something called a “cache”. One device may even store multiple copies of the data (one copy for each Bitwarden app or Bitwarden browser extension that you are using on that device — each of which has its own cache). A “master” copy of the data does reside on a server (i.e., in the cloud), which is the means by which all of the cached copies are synchronized (so that a change made on one device will also be reflected when viewing the vault contents on a different device, or using a different app).

A vault item can exist in only one vault (either an individual vault or an organization vault), but if it resides within an organization vault, then it can actually be assigned to more than one collection within that vault.

If you delete an item (i.e., move it to the Trash folder), then the synchronization process will cause all cached copies of that item to also be deleted (trashed). Therefore, if you view the vault contents from one app and delete an item there, the item will also be deleted from the vault contents as viewed from a different device.

Now you have two independent copies of that item, which are not synchronized (i.e., changes made to the original item will not be reflected in the cloned item, and vice versa). If that is not what you want, then you should delete the original item from your individual vault.

You can only do this by having your wife log in to the Web Vault (e.g., vault.bitwarden.com), and then following the steps I have outlined in this post from a few weeks ago (open the post to see the screenshots):

Also, before you do the above, you must make sure that you have given your wife access permissions to your “Holding Tank” collection.

 

The previous comment in this thread was made on August 1, 2024, which is 114 days ago, or 3.8 months (i.e., approximately 4 months).

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WOW! Thank you “grb” for your prompt response. I am definitely at my wits’ end over getting Bitwarden to work as it seems it should. And clearly I need to do some re-thinking.

I am however very puzzled by your recommendation that my wife log in to provide assistance. As you’d expect since I set up BW on both her laptop and mine (plus Android and Apple tablets), I can readily log in as her. She has access to both her vault and to the shared collection, and so far as I can tell, when I am logged in as her I see the same structure and content that she does (the two laptops are not side by side so I am not absolutely certain the information is identical). Anyhow, I’ll do the reading you suggest and she and I will give your recommendation a try tomorrow. And I can see from your comments that I could have done a better job of describing the caches of encrypted data and their identifying labels. Oops.

Martt

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Hi again '“grb”. You noted that “Also, before you do the above, you must make sure that you have given your wife access permissions to your “Holding Tank” collection.” it seems likely this is part of the problem. At the moment (and from memory, it’s getting late) I’m pretty sure that she has “view only” access while I have “manage” access. I was getting so puzzled that I didn’t try to make a change due to concerns about causing more problems and confusion.

Martt

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Yes, she’ll need “Can Manage” access to be able to clone an item from a collection.

When changing the item ownership (as described in the comment I linked previously), the only options are going to be the organization and “My Vault”. If you do the cloning while logged in to your own account, “My Vault” will be your own vault, not your wife’s vault. So the cloning must be done while logged into your wife’s account.

I worded my instructions as I did because Bitwarden’s Terms of Service state that each Bitwarden account may be used only by one person. I highly doubt that you will get in any trouble for temporarily accessing your wife’s account to assist with configuration issues, but to comply with the letter of the EULA terms, technically, you should not be logging in to your wife’s account.

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OK. But now I have to ask a question I should have asked myself before starting this transition from KeePassX to Bitwarden. Namely, must my wife and I each have a vault, or can we both share the collection, subdivided by a suitable collection structure that identifies which items are whose? And eliminate the individual vaults (or if necessary keep both in existence, each containing a placeholder item so that each us has a master password)? My wife and I have a paid-for “family” Bitwarden structure, one vault for each of us plus a shared vault/collection. But there’s no privacy or access issue, each of us needs full access to all items across the entire range in case something happens to one of us. Plus as a realistic matter I will be the maintainer for all three. I think it would be pretty simple to transfer the items in each of our vaults into appropriately named collections, subdivided as necessary into folders. Your comments / suggestions?

Martt

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Each Bitwarden account always has an associated Individual Vault. Unless you have an Enterprise Plan, you cannot eliminate the individual vaults (“My Vault”). However, the individual vaults do not have to be used to store anything, not even a placeholder item — it is OK to have an individual vault that is completely empty.

So it would be OK for you and your wife to store all of your items (passwords, secure notes, etc.) in the Family organization vault. It may make sense to create separate collections for you and your wife, although you can set access permissions so that you both have equal access to both collections (or perhaps each spouse should have “Can Manage” access to their own collection, but only “Can View” access to the other spouse’s collection — that way no one can get accused of accidentally deleting something that belonged to the other).

The only potential drawback is that because you cannot eliminate the individual vaults, it is possible that if your wife creates a new vault item, she may unintentionally save it in her individual vault instead of in the collection that she shares with you (in fact, the default is for Bitwarden to save new items in the individual vault). If that happens, you will never see that new vault item or know about its existence (unless she tells you about it). If you are going to be creating all vault items yourself, then that might be less of an issue; in that case, I would suggest that you configure your wife’s browser extension settings so the options “Ask to add login” and “Ask to update existing login” are disabled (under Settings > Notifications).

 

In addition to setting up a shared collection, I would recommend that you enable Emergency Access, as explained here:

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Hello again grb. I regret that I haven’t gotten to your immediately preceding reply because transferring items from a shared collection to a vault seems impossible. For me, anyhow. HELP!

First, a few notes for your consideration. These grew out of my several hours’ frustration with a mechanism in Bitwarden that does not appear to work properly.

  1. I am the “Owner” because I originally set up the the Bitwarden family account in October.
  2. I have had “Manage” access to everything. Probably comes with the Owner role. My wife has had “User” permissions.
  3. WHERE you choose to set up permissions seems to impact what privileges can be conferred.
  4. We upgraded my wife to have “Manage” access to the “holding tank” folder in shared collections. That didn’t help.
  5. Becoming desperate, I upgraded her to Admin permissions. That appears to be a blanket permission of some sort. Don’t know yet whether that will help, but going back to User role appears impossible without some sort of penalty. Perhaps applicable to organizational discipline issues?

I think that what I need first and foremost is information about (1) what is the hierarchy of permissions (who’s on first?), then (2) who needs which permissions to make item transfers between collections and vaults, and (3) where and how those permissions are granted. Perhaps then the item transfer process will work. I believe we have faithfully followed your recommended process, plus several ad-hoc variations, and none of them worked for us

Please keep reading…

We changed my wife’s visibility into the joint collection from “View only” to “Manage”. I expected that this change would make it possible for her to access the Admin Console, but it did not. Then we changed her role from User to Admin. That didn’t make any obvious difference either.

I had previously transferred 7 items from my vault to a newly created “holding tank” folder in our shared collection. Goal is to transfer them all to her vault. We logged in to her vault, moved to a view of the holding tank in the shared collection and cloned one of the items. Tried to transfer that cloned version to her vault. The “New Item” form for the cloned item does not include an ownership box but we’re assuming per your previous comments that her vault is implied. We selected the (previously non-existent) No Folder as destination in her vault. As a result we now have both the original item and its clone in the joint shared collection and when we go to her vault, a No Folder addition is shown. But the item we have attempted to transfer is not shown ANYWHERE in her vault. The clone and its non-clone companion are however still displayed in my wife’s All Vaults view. And the Password Manager view now seems terminally “stuck” in the shared collection view; cannot return to viewing her vault without leaving the shared collection – and the red-lettered prompt for leaving her vault looks ominous so we have not done that. Now I am again at a dead end. This all seems terminally confusing and convoluted. And/or not functioning correctly.

And an aside: When you move an item from one folder to another inside a user’s vault, the hamburger prompt says “add to folder” rather than “move to folder”. This suggests that you are creating a duplicate entry, but evidently you are not because the item shows up in the “add-to” folder and disappears from the origin folder. I add this note only because the prompt seems to unhelpfully indicate something different from what actually happens.

Martt