iCloud sync with wife's iPhone

[jimcobber]

Hi, I setup iCloud sync, which is working great across my Apple devices. I want to share the vault with my wife. I could setup on her Mac, it allowed me to logon to my iCloud account to access the data file. With her iPhone, Enpass does not offer the option to use a different iCloud account, so it just looks at her iCloud account. Hopefully there is a trick to getting this to work?

[Discordant]

I haven’t tried this, but I think this could work. It is possible to share a folder between two iCloud accounts. 
 

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210910

 

Set up sharing on the Enpass folder in iCloud and invite your wife only using her iCloud email/login address. 
 

Tell Enpass to restore from her iCloud account. If it works, great. If not, plan B would be for her to use WiFi syncing and have you run the WiFi server on a machine with your vault on it. She’d get your data via WiFi every time she’s on your home network. 

Another possibility might be to use local folder sync. Make sure both your wife and you have a folder you can both access

An old school method is for you to periodically backup your vault and have her restore from your backup periodically. 
 

I’m pretty tired tonight, so I’m sure I’m missing something, but hopefully this helps.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Discordant

[jimcobber]

Thank you for your reply! The API that allows apps to use iCloud storage places the files in an invisible directory that you cannot access from your iCloud account. At one time I figured out how to get to these hidden file locations using Terminal, but I can't remember how I did it... Anyway it seems to me something you can program into the app, after all Enpass iCloud works fine on Macs (including my M1 with 12.1 Beta) by allowing the authentication step.

[Discordant]

Well, I looked in the manual for the official word on this and while they do encourage you to use cloud sync to share a vault, you can only officially sync one vault per cloud account, so it means you'd need more than one to sync two. Not sure how true that is because I was able to create another vault in my account with a different name also synced with iCloud and it seemed to work, but as yesterday, perhaps I'm missing something.

In any case, you can open your iCloud Drive in the Finder and press Command-Shift-. (period). This will show hidden files. Press that key combo again in the Finder to hide them again.

However, I didn't need to use that to access my Enpass vaults. They are visible in your iCloud Drive in the Documents -> Enpass folder. If you share that folder with your wife and it is placed in her iCloud account in the same location, I'd bet her Enpass would find it.

Make sure she has read-write access to the shared Enpass folder.

Oh, and make sure you make a backup of everything before trying to share it, just to be safe.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Discordant

[jimcobber]

I'm running iCloud sync over 6 apple devices, Macs, iPhone, iPad and I can't see where the enpass vault is located even with your cool CmSft. trick. Works fine on wife's Mac after logging in under my account after a prompt. I just got it running on a Win10 machine and it works fine. Surely Enpass can get this working on iPhone app.

[Discordant]

It would work if she were logged into your iCloud account on her iPhone, but her iPhone logged into her iCloud account will never see your sandboxed vault unless you put a copy somewhere her account can see it.

If none of the other methods I suggested worked, try setting up a free Dropbox account and use the same account for both your wife and yourself and set up Dropbox to sync your Enpass vault(s) instead of iCloud.

[jimcobber]

Yes I was using Dropbox before, but for some reason I was having performance issues. So I tried iCloud, which works nice and fast.

I am hoping that Enpass support monitors these threads and recognize this as a feature request.

[Bachsau]

The way Enpass connects to the iCloud on iOS is the right way to do it. The macOS version uses a different approach, which might allow you to set it up with a different account, but also causes the session timeout problem, because it's not the way it's meant to be done by Apple.

Furthermore you shouldn't share accounts with your wife. Encourage her to get her own ones.