Moving from LastPass
to Steganos
Password Manager

If you are leaving LastPass, you do not have to retype your logins. Steganos Password Manager reads a LastPass export directly – with user names, passwords, addresses, notes and even the folders LastPass calls "groups". Allow five to ten minutes.

You need two things: access to your LastPass vault and Steganos Password Manager on your Windows PC. If you do not have it yet, you can try it for 30 days free of charge and without a subscription – the import behaves exactly the same in the trial version.

Step 1: Export your LastPass vault as a CSV file

Sign in to your LastPass account and open the export – it sits in the advanced account settings under "Export". LastPass asks for your master password once more and then saves a CSV file on your computer.

Two things matter at this point:

• The export file is unencrypted plain text. Anyone who can open it reads every one of your passwords. So do not put it in a cloud folder, do not send it by e-mail and do not leave it lying about after the import – how to get rid of it is explained further down.
• Do not open and save the file in Excel. When saving, Excel is fond of writing semicolons instead of commas as the separator and changes the header row – after that the import no longer recognises the format.

The first line of the file is the header row, and that is what Password Manager recognises the format by. In a current LastPass export it looks like this:

url,username,password,totp,extra,name,grouping,fav

Older exports without the totp column are read as well. If something else is there, the format is wrong – in that case export again rather than repairing the file by hand.

Step 2: Read the export into Password Manager

1. Open Steganos Password Manager and unlock the keychain the entries are meant for. If you do not have one yet, create it first.
2. In the File menu open Import and choose LastPass CSV... – not one of the browser entries, those are for Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
3. Select the file you have just exported. Password Manager reports "Import successful" and your entries appear in the list.

You can repeat the import later if you want to bring more entries across. Entries that are already there are kept, so do check afterwards whether anything has ended up twice.

What is carried over

The import maps the columns of the LastPass file onto the fields of Password Manager:

• name becomes the title of the entry
• username and password become the user name and the password
• url becomes the website of the entry
• extra becomes the note
• grouping – the LastPass folder, that is – becomes the category
• fav carries the favourite marker across, totp the field for one-time passwords

What LastPass does not export cannot come along: file attachments and the permissions of shared folders. You will have to set up both again.

Afterwards: securely delete the export file

The CSV file holds every one of your passwords in plain text. Dragging it into the Recycle Bin is not enough – the data stays on the hard disk afterwards and can be brought back with simple means. Our guide "Why the Recycle Bin is not enough to securely delete your data" explains at length why that is.

So delete the file with a tool that genuinely overwrites it. Steganos Shredder does exactly that and is included in Steganos Privacy Suite and in Steganos Data Safe. Do think of the copy in your Downloads folder as well, and of a cloud folder that may be syncing along.

If the import does not go through

If Password Manager reports "The data is not in the correct format.", the header row does not fit. Open the file in Notepad (not in Excel) and compare the first line with the one printed above. The most common causes: the file was saved in a spreadsheet program in the meantime, or it is not a LastPass export at all but one from another program – for 1Password and KeePass there are separate entries in the same menu.

If it reports instead that no entries could be found, the file is built correctly but holds no rows apart from the header. That happens when the wrong vault was selected during the export.