Moving to bitwarden "lite" from normal bitwarden

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1

I run a dockerized setup of bitwarden (self hosted) using bitwarden.sh wrapper script. This is way too complex/heavy for my needs. I stumbled upon the Bitwarden Lite deployment that’s designed for home labs, and that is exactly what I need: Lite Deployment | Bitwarden

So I exported all the data out of my vault (export type “.zip with attachments”).

Stopped the old “heavy” Bitwarden instance, started the “Lite” one, signed up, and imported my backup.

All my items showed up, but I found that

  1. None of the attachments were in place (even though their parent entries showed up)
  2. The “date created” and “date modified” were updated to be the time when I did the import.

Re (1), I am aware there is a bug right now that is preventing saving of attachments, is this why attachments did not come across?

And re (2), is this expected behavior? Ideally, I’d like the ‘Date created’ and ‘Date modified’ fields not to be overwritten with the date the items were imported into the vault.

2

Both outcomes are expected.

1.- Bitwarden lets you automatically export all attachments from your individual vault (not from an organization vault) since version 2025.5.0. But there is no way of importing them back automatically. This has to be done manually item-by-item.

2.- Item metadata is lost when you import an exported vault, always has been. The two other things that are also lost are sends and items in the trash.

This is if you backup up your data with export/import (as you would with any cloud hosted vault).

With self-hosting, there is a way of backing up and restoring server data. But I don’t know if this is suitable in your migration scenario.

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3

Appreciate the repsonse. Unfortunately the migration guide but it isn’t applicable to my situation, as I’m going from the default mssql container based database solution to sqlite.