With the latest upgrade, managing environment variables is adding a tremendous work load. This morning when I accessed my desktop Postman, many environment variables for the production environment are gone. I did not delete them. Please explain how these could have been deleted. Is Postman Desktop no longer independent of Postman Cloud? A co-worker is using Postman Desktop with his personal account and is able to export his environment variables in the settings option. I’m logged into my work account and unable to do so - it’s grayed out - I imagine this is a company policy set in place, for which I’m currently pursuing more information. We need a solution other than re-enter all the variables and values, share them, then do constant exports in case they are somehow deleted.
Hey
After the latest Postman upgrade, the Desktop app now fully syncs with the Postman Cloud, so it’s no longer independent.
Your local environment variables were likely overwritten by the cloud version during sync.
The grayed-out export option means your organization’s admin has restricted exports — that’s why your coworker (on a personal account) can export but you can’t.
Ask your admin to temporarily allow exports or check if older environment versions exist in your workspace on web.postman.co.
That’s the safest way to recover and back up your environments.
I just experienced the same thing. A whole bunch of my variable values got wiped out, and it’s not the first time. Incredibly frustrating.
The ones that got wiped out appear to be ones that I have marked sensitive.
Yeah faced the issue myself quite a lot
This is just speculation, but I wonder if this has something to do with non-secret variables being uploaded to the cloud while secret values are not. It could be that Postman wants to go through all my variables and update them with what’s in the cloud. It then sees my secret variable, doesn’t see a corresponding value on the cloud, and then mistakenly concludes that the value should be blank. Just a theory. Could be way off base.
I am not sure about that i think @gbadebo-bello can explain how it works.
I really do not like the changes to the environment variables, they have tripped me up so many times. I guess I’ll get used to it, but I don’t think that it’s an improvement but rather a change for change’s sake.
Hey @gddrew 
Welcome to the Postman Community! 
The only main difference with the new Simplified Variables (Apart from the name and description), is that they are no longer shared/synced by Default. Previously, if you were manually creating a variable, it would be available to everyone. That becomes a huge risk when working with sensitive data in areas like Public Workspaces.
If you prefer to see what is Local and what is Shared, you can opt to show both columns in the view:
Are they other scenarios that these have been confusing or tripped you up? We’re always looking to improve things. 
Hey @jlarge / @security-candidate-2
There was an issue that was identified and a fix was shipped recently, are you and all your teammates running the latest version?
Do you you work between the app and web versions when setting variables?
If you could share more context and details around how and when you have seen this happening, we’ll be able to take a deeper look and investigate what could be the reason.
We do have an open issue around this topic where the team is taking a look:
I’m on 11.71.5. I only ever work on the Desktop. I don’t really need the web version. As for context, it’s an environment that I have set up with a bunch of filled in variables, and then one day I come in, and many of them have been blanked out. I think they happened to all be ones marked as secret, which unfortunately means I have to stop using that feature to avoid losing my variable values again.
Thanks for responding 
They would have likely been marked as sensitive, rather than secret but I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with just that type of variable.
I would also recommend not putting anything sensitive into a variable and make use of your local Vault, which is an encrypted data store for thing like API Keys, tokens, secrets, etc.
I believe that logging out of your account and back in again would be a good step forward here to ensure that the local db is reset. Backup any local or unshared values as those would also be cleared if you log out.
OK, I quickly looked at the vault feature, and from what I can tell, it seems to be environment agnostic. One thing I do a lot is to have the same variable name in multiple environments so that I can quickly switch environment and have everything working with minimal effort. If I start using this vault, my impression is that I would have to do a bunch of variable switching on every request I have every time I need to switch environments.