Managing Your Vault
Within your vault, you can store four (4) different types of items: Logins, Cards, Identity, and Secure Notes. You can also create folders within your personal vault, to store your different items in a more organized fashion, if desired. Within your vault you also have the ability to trash items, which will stay in your trash for 30 days before being permanently deleted. If you are added to an Organization, every user will have access to the Collections they are permitted to see, and then your personal vault. Organization settings are determined and monitored by the owner and/or admin of that specific organization.
There are a couple of different ways to add an item to your vault. The first is by adding it directly from Bitwarden by selecting ‘Add a Login’ or the + sign, the other option, when you log into a site that you currently do not have saved to Bitwarden, once you are logged in, a pop up will display like the one to the right that will prompt an option for you to Save those credentials to Bitwarden or Never save. By selecting ‘Yes, Save Now” it will create a new login item with that username and password for you to access at any time.
If you decide to add an item directly through Bitwarden client application, as you can see by this screenshot example, you will select the type between login, card, identity, secure note… the name of the item, if it is for Amazon, naming it Amazon or something affiliated with the item, add the username and password for that specific login-- keep in mind that if you are using Bitwarden to create a new account, you can use the password generator to generate a new password for you which would be specific just for that login and based on a variety of password variables. Additional fields you can fill out when adding an item are the URL. This field will auto populate if you are currently on the site, but if not on the site The URL can be added to the field. Lastly, you can specify a specific folder you would like the item to be added within your vault or if you are a part of additional organizations, you can select if you own it or if it is going to a specific shared organization.
Head over to Organizing your vault for tips and tricks on how to organize your vault information.
When creating new logins or updating current logins within Bitwarden, the Bitwarden Password Generator feature generates passwords for you based on specific criteria: including, the length you want or is required for the password, the complexity (capital letters, numbers, special characters), the random combination of characters, and making sure the password is unique per login. The great thing about this feature is that it does the work of creating the password for you and also you do not have to worry about remembering it!
Within your vault, the ‘Settings’ section is where you can manage your folders, sync your vault, and also set additional security features like locking your vault or logging out. I would recommend looking at your settings and making those updates based on your preferences. With regard to syncing your vault, you can access Bitwarden wherever it is convenient for you. When you add an item to your web vault, it will automatically sync throughout all of your client applications. Your personal Web Vault will always remain in-sync. Organization Vaults will automatically sync across users and client applications every 30 minutes. The Vault Timeout Action features are based on how long Bitwarden can be inactive before timing-out. “Inactivity” is determined by the time since interacting with Bitwarden, not system idle time. Configuring this option will dictate what Bitwarden will do once the Vault Timeout time-constraint has lapsed. As mentioned, Bitwarden can either: lock or log out. Locking your vault means you will be prompted to enter your master password to decrypt your vault, and you will not need to use the two-step login, if enabled. Also, other options such as unlock with biometrics and unlock with PIN are available. Remember a locked vault is still decrypted on your device. On the flip side, logging out of your vault will require you to enter your email address, master password, and any enabled two step login method to access your vault.
Before we get into the next topic, which is how to share an item to an Organization, I wanted to briefly talk about organizations.
We have talked about your individual, personal vault, which every Bitwarden user has. However, when it comes to Organizations, we have a couple of different organization plans to choose from based on either your needs or your companies needs. For today’s session, we will spend some time talking about Family Organizations. A Family Organization is there to share private data between you and 5 friends or family members. Families Organizations include all premium features for all 6 users and unlimited secure data sharing within the Families Organization. Shared items are placed into a Collection, much like a folder and can be assigned to one or more members to access.
View or download the presentation.
