How to migrate your Bitwarden vaults from US to EU storage

2023-07-27 By admin

When Bitwarden users sign-up for an account, they have the choice between storing their vault data on Bitwarden’s US or EU servers. Many users of the password management service may not even realize that they have a choice in the matter.

Users who created an account already can’t just switch to using a server in the other supported region. While it is possible to migrate data storage from one region to the other, it is not as easy as pushing a button in the vault settings, and requires backing up passwords.

Bitwarden: EU or US servers?

To find out if the vault is stored on EU or US servers, Bitwarden users may check the URL of the Bitwarden website:

EU server: https://vault.bitwarden.eu/
US server: https://vault.bitwarden.com/

New users should take note of the URL, or use the region selector on the sign-up page to make sure the server region is set correctly before continuing.

Migrating from US to EU servers, and vice versa

Bitwarden notes that its server regions are “distinct cloud environments”, which means that they are separate entities. The service’s zero-knowledge encryption support prevents the organization’s support from migrating vaults for customers from one server region to another.

This leaves a manual process for moving vaults. Here is how that is done:

Sign-in to the current Bitwarden account and export all Vaults.
Open the main webpage of the new server region and create a new account, using the same email address as the current account.
Import the vault into the new account.

This is all that free Bitwarden users have to do to switch server regions. Paying Bitwarden customers need to contact support so that they may resume their subscription in the new region.

Organizations may also use a migration script that helps them from data from one installation to another. Bitwarden has a support page here that explains the process. Manual migration would involve asking users to manually export and import their vaults into the new region.

Closing Words

Migrating from one Bitwarden server location to another is possible, but it requires creating a new account, importing vault data into the new account and contacting Bitwarden support to get the license migrated as well, if a commercial version of the password management service is used.

Now You: do you use Bitwarden? Which server region do you use?

Summary

Article Name

How to migrate your Bitwarden vaults from US to EU storage

Description

Find out how to migrate a Bitwarden account and all password data from US to EU storage, and vice versa.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

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