My password manager locked me out after a failed update on Sunday morning

I was trying to login to my bank account and the browser extension just crashed every time. After reinstalling it three times I realized the local vault file got corrupted somehow. Has anyone else had their manager break like this and found a way to pull the data back out?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow24422d ago

The "keeps a backup copy hidden in the app data folder" thing isn't always a guarantee though. Most password managers do keep a backup, but it's usually encrypted with the same master password, so if that part got corrupted you're still in the same boat. I had Bitwarden go bad on me once and the backup file in AppData was just as unusable as the main vault because the key that unlocks it was part of the corrupted data. You really gotta check if the backup is actually a plain text export or just another encrypted copy before you panic too much about finding it.

charles50822d ago

That "local vault file got corrupted" part hit close to home because I used to think password managers were basically bulletproof but last year mine did the same thing after a bad sync and I lost everything including some old work logins. I spent two days digging through backups and finally found that most managers keep a backup copy hidden in the app data folder that you can manually rename and import. On my end I got lucky and found a cached version from a week earlier but it made me paranoid enough to start exporting a plain text backup every few months.