Sanity Checking Moving a Computerphobe Family Member From Lastpass to Bitwarden

Ask the Community Password Manager
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1

I’ve signed up using the family plan, and have migrated myself over from LastPass. It took me a fair bit of work and time to get myself completely settled in to Bitwarden, but that was more a matter of the sorry state of my LastPass vault than it was any failing of Bitwarden itself.

My next task is to move my wife over. She is not very technically savvy, and fairly phobic when it comes to technology. She is in no way capable of migrating her own LastPass stuff over by herself, and from a quick look at the state of her LastPass vault–well, let’s just say that it’s gonna be some tough sledding for whoever will be performing the migration…

…which, realistically, is going to have to be me.

As an additional challenge, I will have extremely-limited access to her computer, as she uses it most days and evenings for her day job as well as her personal projects after-hours.

Here’s my thinking about how best to approach this:

On my computer, I would set up an organization, and configure it to give me full read/write/delete access to every entry in it.

From her computer, I would export the contents of her LastPass vault, and import it into Bitwarden.

I would then go back to my own computer and start trudging through all her entries, securing things as I go.

I can then–from her computer–move her entries back out of the organization and into her personal vault.

During this time I can work with her to get her comfortable with the Bitwarden way of manually filling login fields. At some point she’ll have to learn how to handle password changes, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Does all this seem like a reasonable approach? I’d greatly appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks for your time!

2

If she does not already have a Bitwarden account, you can just create a second Bitwarden account (which will eventually become hers), which only requires you to have access to an email address that is different from the one used for your own Bitwarden account (this could be an email alias, such as the “plus” address formats that are used in Gmail). Set everything up properly, then you can change the login email to her email, and let her change the master password (or you can change it for her, if this information will not be confidential).

I don’t know much about Lastpass, so I’m not sure whether you actually need access to her computer in order to do the export. Let’s assume that you do. If you put the exported CSV on a USB, then you should be able to do everything else from your own computer:

  1. Set up a new Bitwarden account using a temporary email and password.
  2. Import her Lastpass data into the new account.
  3. Clean up and test the vault entries as necessary.
  4. Change the Bitwarden email and password to the credentials that your wife will use.
  5. Install Bitwarden clients (at least the browser extension) on your wife’s computer.
  6. Have your wife log in to the Bitwarden browser extension on her computer, then configure the preferences for vault timeout period, timeout action, biometrics (if applicable), etc.

You really don’t need to bother with organizations unless you have certain credentials that will be shared and used by both of you.

2 Likes
3

Oh, that sounds much more straightforward than what I was thinking of doing. Thanks for sharing an alternative perspective on the situation!

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I also wanted to point out, that once items are moved from an individual vault to a shared Organizational vault into a collection, that item is essentially “owned” by that Organization at that point.
While it can be done, and is possible to Clone an item back into your individual vault from a shared Org collection, if there are many items that would need to be cloned back and then deleted this may be cumbersome.
So you will likely have less items that need to be “moved” from her individual vault to a shared Collection, so for the few that might be needed that would probably be easier.

5

Ah, that’s a very good point–thanks for letting me know about that!