Migrating from Steel.app to 1Password
August 4, 2009 § 2 Comments
For years I’ve used Steel.app from Gravity to manage all my passwords. Alas, as sometimes happens, they’ve decided to discontinue that product. 😦
To their credit, they’re offering a 20% discount on the User-Friendy-but-Ugly-Safari-Hack 1Password from Agile Web Solutions. Unfortunately, since Steel.app is freeform and 1Password is structured, they say you have to cut and paste everything manually.
Not true! If you (like me, and I suspect many others) used a consistent column scheme for storying your passwords, it is actually quite easy to migrate your data automatically. Find out how below…
Update: you can use a similar process to import from Steel.app into PasswordWallet, a simpler but less intrusive alternative to 1Password.
1. Launch Steel.app with your usual password document
Steel.app supports multiple user documents, but 1Password is designed to work with a single keychain. You probably are storing everything in a single document, but if not you can always repeat these steps.
2. From the Steel.app “File” menu, choose “Export” -> “All Categories”
This will bring up a “Save” panel with a file name defaulting to “Filename.txt”.
3. Make sure you know what directory you are saving into (I recommend the top-level “Desktop”) and click “Save”.
4. Now, go back to the Finder and launch the “1Password” application.
You can use their 30-day trial if you’re not sure you want to buy it.
5. From the 1Password “File” menu, choose “Import…”
This will bring up the Import Assistant panel:
6. Select “Generic Text” from the popup:
7. Click “Continue”
8. Click “Choose File…” and select the file you saved in Step #3.
It should automatically detect the right encoding; if not, try something else until the text looks legible.
9. Click “Start Import”
This brings up the “Specify file contents format” pane:
THIS is where things finally start to get tricky. 1Password will only import Login data in a usable form if:
- You included the URL, username, and password as separate columns
- You used the same columns consistently throughout your Steel.app document
To be sure, it will still sorta-work if you were “mostly” consistent, but it will not accurately import any rows that don’t conform to that scheme. Conversely, if you only have completely unstructured data, you can set “Item Type:” to “Secure Note”.
You need to do three things:
a. Set “Start import at line:” to “1”
b. Use the popups to identify which column to input for:
- Title
- URL/Location
- username
- password
- Folder (“Category”)
c. Click “Continue”
10. Preview import
If you like, you can now deselect non-conforming rows, change the folder used for imports, or even (using the action menu in the lower left) edit fields before import.
Or, if you’re lazy like me, just click “Import Selected Objects” and sort it all out later.
11. View results
When you finish, you’ll get something that looks like this (depending on how many categories you had, and what you named your folder):
If everything went smoothly — and you installed the 1Password haxie into your web browser — you can start logging in with those passwords right away. You may still need to cut and paste your credit card and other non-login information into the appropriate buckets, though. 😦
That’s all I can help you with — see the User’s Guide for more information. Good luck!
iHack, therefore iBlog 
[…] you to 1Password, Ernest Prabhakar beat us to publishing a how-to about the process at his site, iHack. The process is fairly straightforward and takes advantage of our powerful Import Assistant tool, […]
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