Vault possibly corrupted. No entries loading! Need help

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Hello,

I already contacted support, but I thought I might as well try here for possible solutions.

This afternoon I reset my master password and rotated my encryption key. I got a generic error, but could still login fine with the new password after getting automatically logged out. I unauthorized all sessions and then tried to setup ‘login with passkey’. Figured it wasn’t for me and turned it off again after trying it to login.

Then I tried to re-login on my phone, but on successful login, the app would crash. Which also happened on my tablet. I tried the web vault again and could login, but actually opening the vault would result in just a loading circle.

None of the export options work, except for the json with account protection password. The others just give no error, but also no file download. If I open the one json export, I can see that for username and password the data is populated, but encrypted of course.

For troubleshooting: I tried different browser engines (Chromium/Firefox). Re-enabling the passkey login with and without vault encryption. Re-exporting the data and trying to import it. (I specifically get the error: Cannot read properties of null (reading ‘null’). But that hasn’t at all worked.

If I login on the web vault and try to load my passwords and look in the browser console, then I get multiple “MAC comparison failed. Key or payload has changed” and “Unhandled error in angular typeError: cannot read properties of null” errors.

If I run browser command: “bitwardencontainerservice.cryptoService.getUserKey().then(e => console.log(e))” It at least seems to properly export the encKey or what’s left of it now. Afaik.

If I look in the browser logs during the different vault exports, no new message appears in the logs.

I tried using an old Bitwarden portable to get the data.json to manually decrypt. But when I login to the application it just keeps loading and never actually shows the vault. After a while it times out back to the password input screen.

I tried multiple devices, browsers, OS’s. I don’t know what more to check. As far as I can find I don’t have an earlier backup or old cached files of bitwarden desktop on my devices. Stupid, but lesson learned.

Can someone help me? Many thanks.

1 Like
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@Quiesdee Welcome to the forum!

I wish that you had asked for help before trying the above. If you had only disconnected your device from the internet before opening the portable Bitwarden app, then you would have had access to all of your old passwords, and been able to create an export for starting fresh with a new account.

Unfortunately, by launching the app while connected to the internet, it was able to discover that you had deauthorized all sessions, and thus dutifully logged you out of the app, purging the contents of the local vault cache that was stored in your data.json file.

Unless you happen to have another copy of that data.json file, you are now at the mercy of the Customer Support team. Hopefully they will be able to restore your account data from their backups.

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Hi,

I think I get what you mean, but there never was any cache to protect from being purged. Only after the fact I downloaded the Bitwarden portable app to try it out for a manual export. I was never actively using the desktop app so there wasn’t anything to purge.

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OK, you had mentioned an “old Bitwarden portable” and a “data.json” file, so I assumed that you has used the portable app in the past, and still had its data.json file left from that usage.

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If you do have any additional devices, you might try what @grb suggested with those. Disconnect them from the Internet before touching Bitwarden or any web browsers on it. Then, see if you can unlock the vault and backup with a plain JSON or a password-protected JSON.

If you altered the vault encryption settings you might have set them to a value greater than what iOS can handle. Perhaps restoring them to the values you had “yesterday” or to the factory defaults may make iOS behave again.

Most likely, you will need Bitwarden support to roll your vault back to what it was a few days ago, which means you will once again be using your old password. Do note that they only keep 7 days of “backups”, so don’t delay if you want to take this approach.

Then, before you make any “system wide” settings, create your own export so that you can do any potential rollback on your own.

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Yes, good idea. I’ll see if I my Linux install still has some cache left.