The 10k character limit on secure notes is a problem. It completely broke my import from Lastpass, forcing me to edit the CSV file to remove all my secure notes in Excel.
Now I would like the longer notes in Bitwarden, that would be the ideal solution. But if you have a varchar(10000) somewhere making that difficult or expensive to do, that’s OK too.
Breaking the import process is not OK though. It shouldn’t barf on those notes. Ideally it would import the first 10k characters of each note then give the user a clear error message so they don’t think they got the full thing imported. Or alternatively, but not as ideally, just skip importing those notes and still clearly inform the user.
I ran into the same problem. And some of my Notes can’t be safely split into pieces, so for the moment I am unable to transition to Bitwarden. The field sizes should be bumped up a little for at least paid users, so we can smoothly switch to Bitwarden.
Remove the 10,000 encrypted character limit for Notes. This just seems utterly ridiculous to me. Why is this even a thing? What makes this request so difficult to accommodate? There’s at least a few string data types out there that support arbitrary character lengths, not to mention blobs. I just don’t get why this is an issue at all…
For those looking to fix their import because of the Ciphers[XXX] error, open the exported .csv file in Excel, go to row number XXX + 2 (e.g. if Ciphers[258], go to row 260), and this row is the entry causing the import error. Chances are it’s thousands of characters in length. It doesn’t have to be 10,000 characters, however. It can be significantly shorter. The encrypted hash of that entry is likely what makes it longer than 10,000 characters.
@yep Thanks for the information regarding the offset to the number mentioned in the error message. That was the key to find the offending Secure Notes in Lastpass. Please for heaven’s sake Bitwarden remove this 10,000 limit for notes. At least when an importing of data hits this issue provide meaningful error message that provides the end user some where to look for the offending data.
Sorry to say I have had to purge all of my information out of BitWarden. I do not know if the exporting from Lastpass has munged the data or opening the CSV file into Excel did it or what but I discovered that at least 2 login credentials had the numeric information in one of the fields converted over to a number in exponential notation. I can not in all good faith rely on the importing of the data being reliable so I deleted all of it.
LastPass limits secure notes to 45,000 characters. Bitwarden limits secure notes to 10,000 characters.
I think these limits should be completely eliminated. Let memory, storage, and network speed, be the only limits.
Implementation should be possible. Behind the scenes, store secure notes in fragments. When a secure note is edited, identify the changed fragments (by calculating and comparing cryptographic checksums fragment by fragment) and update only those fragments that have changed.
Delta updates are very common these days, so I imagine libraries are available to implement them.
But we still want to protect the user against accidents, so merely warn when some soft limit is exceeded, so the user doesn’t accidentally past a huge document into a secure note without intending to.
I agree along with the ability to require users to enter the master password to view select secure notes. These two things I have relied on in LP that makes moving to Bitwarden that I may not move forward on.
Any update on enhancing the character limit? I have a secure note in Lastpass that is over 30000 characters, unencrypted, so this would be split into 4 notes in Bitwarden
Every user I convinced to switch to BW hit this problem, and I did myself. The fix involves opening the file in Excel and manually editing. Not a great experience particularly for new users!
The strange thing is that when I write a long note in Pages which shows the character count as 7800 including whitespaces and then paste it into a Secure Note, it tells me it’s over 10,000 characters. How is this possible?
Can we please increase this limit? And offer some sort of formatting options like 1Password?
I believe the limit is based on the encrypted length, not the original length of the text. So yeah - you must have just crossed that fine boundary where it was just exceeded.
I agree that there are many valid use cases where this needs to be improved. Thankfully, it looks like this one is in the queue for revision at some point - hopefully sooner than later!
In the meantime, one workaround (albeit not entirely elegant) is to save the long note as a text file and attach it to the vault item. It will stay secure and with your item, but the two downsides are that you have to download it every time that you want to view it and a Bitwarden export will not save the file attachment (those have to be done manually).
If it crashes, rather than nicely handling it, then it’s a bug. To not be a bug, it would need to continue importing and either skip the note, truncate it, or give the user an option.
Any update on this? March 15, 2022 this is still an issue.
I’m writing an app to modify the lastpass.csv file to truncate the notes fields so I can import it into bitwarden, but the effort is extended because of the following lastpass file format issues (not your fault, of course)
Some fields can be quoted, while others are not.
quoted fields can have quotes in them.
quoted fields can have commas in them (complicating finding the correct commas for delimiters)
notes fields can be multiline, and there’s no end-of-record delimiter.
At the moment, I’ve got almost everything working, with plenty of test cases in unit tests, but now have to handle the multi-line notes.
It appears you already handle all of this. Just adding a small snipped of code to truncate the note would be significantly less effort than everything I’m doing.
