Organizations and Collections

I have been a KeePass user for years. Based on the latest Linux Journal article, I am giving Bitwarden a try. I hope the integration between all my devices and browsers will be a big benefit. I use win10 and Android with Chrome as a browser, my wife uses win10 and IOS devices with Chrome.

I signed up for an “always free” account, with the intention of sharing it with my wife. I was under the assumption that we could keep our password databases separate with collections.

I had my KeePass 1.x entries organized into folders and subfolders. The xml export from KeePass 1.x will not import into Bitwarden, so I installed KeePass 2.x and imported the 1.x database into 2.x. Exporting xml from KeePass 2.x also failed importing into Bitwarden with an error that said too many organizations. I finally figured out that it could not deal with my folder structure. I moved all my folders to the top level in KeePass and exported them one at a time. I was then able to import them into the default vault, My Vault, that is in the blue heading at the top of the page.

I was able to create folders and folder/subfolders to organize my database in a similar fashion to what it looked like in KeePass. I have over 20 folders and subfolders with over 500 password entries. So far, so good.

I installed the Win10 web app and Chrome browser extention and the Andriod app. These seem to work well. Again, so far so good. I wanted to test it with my database before setting up my wife.

Here is where my confusion starts. I saw a default collection at the bottom of My Vault and renamed it Denny for me. I created a new collection and named it Jean for my wife. I invited her and successfully added her as a user with access to only the Jean collection. As the owner, I have access to both collections.

If I click the My Vault tab in the blue title bar, I see all my folders and entries. However, if I click the Denny collection at the bottom of the left column, I see nothing in the My Vault middle column, just “There are no items to list.”.

Furthermore, I logged out of the web interface as myself and logged in with my wife’s credentials. I created a test entry in her My Vault. When I log out as her, and log in as myself, I do not see this test entry in the Jean collection.

What is going on here? Is this documented anywhere? I have spent several hours Googling with no joy. The docs I find about Organizations and Collections and Folders do not help.

I am hoping that there is a way to have my database show up in the Denny collection and my wife’s database show up in the Jean collection. As the owner, I should be able to see both collections, As a user, my wife should only see the Jean collection.

If someone can shed some light on this, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks!
Denny

Sorry to reply to a million-year-old thread, but my understanding is that each user has their own personal data store that is private to them. All shared passwords are part of collections, and there is no way to set a default collection for all new items. So you have to manually choose the “owner” and collection each time you create an item. Kind of a bummer really.

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