I was looking to update the password in my ProtonMail account today, and I selected the BitWarden entry for my original login in the Firefox browser extension pulldown. I clicked on the Clone option and saw that it had “-clone” amended to the title and thought, great, here I go. I generated a new password, and used it to update the password in Protonmail.
I neglected to notice (total beginner) that I needed to Save the new clone and somehow when I came back to BitWarden, the clone was gone along with any record of the new password!! I tried pasting the clipboard contents to an empty text window (I’m on a Mac) but that seemed to have either emptied itself or gotten overwritten (may have been me by accident, don’t remember).
I’ve written to tech support to find out if there’s any kind of “history” written into my cloud vault that could give me a clue how to figure out what the missing password is.
Protonmail people got back to me straight away (unlike BitWarden tech support-10 hours and counting) and reminded me that the beauty of their secure email system is that they don’t have access to un-encrypted data at their end (either passwords or our email info), so as it’s encrypted locally on my system I’ll need to figure a solution from the BW password manager end.
I haven’t logged out of my Protonmail account, or quit my browser all day, as I’m hoping that might help with any recovery that might be possible.
Hope someone might be able to give me a clue where I stand.
The password generator had a history screen that will show you all your previously generated passwords. Have a look there and hopefully you’ll find the one for ProtonMail.
Bear in mind, when you first go into that tab it generates a password, so the history will have a new one right at the top, followed by any previous ones. If you haven’t generated any passwords since this happened, it should be the second one down.
>>>> The password generator had a history screen that will show you all your previously generated passwords. Have a look there and hopefully you’ll find the one for ProtonMail. <<<<
As with all these things, I’m sure if I’d have had the time to completely RTFM when I first started working with BitWarden, I would have known this fact.
What a total lifesaver. Thanks for being around here to dig me out of a hole that I’ve been pulling my hair out over all day. Great stuff.
For anyone else who may find this thread in the future, there’s something unique about the way these passwords operate when they are copied to the Mac clipboard.
They paste fine between dialogue boxes that require a password, but they don’t appear in the clipboard when you show it from the Finder, and they won’t paste into a standard text document.
That was why I couldn’t get access to it this morning when I was prettty sure I still had it on my clipboard. It must use some special format that I’ve never come across before.
Ah, fantastic! Glad you’ve managed to recover your password Steve I’ve needed that history screen a couple of times myself - forgetting to hit Save after making changes is an easy mistake to make!
I’ve needed that history screen a couple of times myself - forgetting to hit Save after making changes is an easy mistake to make!