Importing maFiles from Steam Desktop Authenticator

Your accounts are yours. Import reads the same .maFile format SDA writes, shows you what it found, and stores nothing until you say so.

Before you start

1. Find your maFiles

They live in the maFiles folder inside your SDA installation directory, one .maFile per account, named after the SteamID — plus a manifest.json.

2. Select them

Choose Import maFiles and select the account files. If your maFiles are encrypted you also need manifest.json: it holds the salt and initialisation vector, and without it an encrypted maFile cannot be decrypted at all. If you select an encrypted file and forget the manifest, the application looks for one beside the files you picked and adds it for you.

3. Unlock, if they are encrypted

You will be asked for the passphrase you set in SDA — not your Steam password, and not the passphrase for this application's vault. It is used to decrypt the files in memory and is not stored.

4. Review what was found

Nothing has been written yet at this point. The report lists each account it could read and flags anything that matters:

• Accounts already in your vault, so you do not import a duplicate.
• A maFile with no identity_secret — it will generate login codes but cannot confirm trades, and it is better to know now.
• A maFile with no revocation code, which means detaching that authenticator later will need Steam Support.
• A proxy setting found inside the file, which you can adopt or discard.
• Files that could not be read at all, and why.

Tick what you want. Everything else is discarded when you close the screen.

5. Confirm the codes match

Put the two applications side by side and check that an imported account shows the same five characters as SDA does. Same secret, same clock, same code. That is your proof the import worked before you rely on it.

Leaving again

Export writes an account back out as a standard .maFile, readable by SDA. There is no lock-in, and that is deliberate: a tool that made your secrets hard to take elsewhere would be behaving like the thing it is meant to replace.

Related

• What is actually inside a maFile
• How they are stored once imported
• Full documentation