Vault Import/Export and Backup

[lfom]

Hello!

First of all, thank you a lot for making and maintaining Buttercup. I tried and tested many different options for a multi-platform personal vault for important data and Buttercup is what gets close to a good solution. I basically need to store and sync OTP data between desktop (Linux and macOS), Android and iOS. It seems that a new version of the mobile app is due soon (hopefully, it is the weaker part of Buttercup as of now), so I would like to make a few remarks of the desktop app.

At least on Linux, it does not save and restore the app window layout (columns width) between launches. It is not a big deal, I just wanted to point this out.

My main concern is related to importing and exporting data: I could not find a way to import data reliably. Even when using Buttercup's own CSV format, the data is always imported with empty fields, and always as plain text fields, and it does not keep the entry data type either (login, website, etc), it is always imported as login items. I could not find a way to change the entry type as well so importing an old exported file cannot be used reliably as backup.

A simple solution would be simply ignore empty fields besides the basic ones (title, username, password) and automatically change the type if some known field is found (OTP, URL, etc). I took a look a the buttercup-importer repo code but I could not info about the field or entry types. If there is some documentation about it and it would be useful, I can try so send a PR with some improvements.

So I guess the only reliable way to backup the data is copying the vault database? It it enough to simply manually replace the vault file if restoring data is needed, and no data will be lost?

Thanks again. Regards.

[perry-mitchell]

Thanks @lfom - I appreciate the detailed post and I'm sorry I haven't responded earlier. Indeed we need to improve our import/export process, and the Buttercup export/import process should yield identical vaults (for the most part). Definitely an area we need to work on. At least a dedicated Buttercup JSON export/import would go a long way to bridging the gap. On this note, buttercup actually has a concept here that could be re-used: facades. These are JSON objects that represent one's vault while in transit between the different browser/app components - using this for exports would be quite straightforward.