Bugs with setup of account recovery key & iCloud Advanced Data Protection

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Bugs with setup of account recovery key & iCloud Advanced Data Protection

I just created an account Recovery Key on my M1 Mac mini tonight (macOS 13.1). I printed out the 28-digit key on my printer and also manually keyed it into my Strongbox password manager. Finally, I restarted the Mac after doing those steps..

Now that I'm trying to activate iCloud Advanced Data Protection, I'm running into 2 problems:

I clicked the Advanced Data Protection <Turn On...> button which brings up an advisory window. When I then click the <Review Recovery Methods> button, I just get a spinning circle for a couple seconds, then back to the same window. Multiple attempts yield the same result.
If I go back into Account Recovery setup it says "Recovery Key: Off" (which is incorrect). When I click the <Manage...> button, the next window comes up showing that my Recovery Key is, in fact, ON.

So I'm stuck.

Mac mini

Posted on Dec 26, 2022 5:56 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 27, 2022 7:47 AM in response to AllTheDetails

No longer stuck! 😃

The problems seemed to resolve themselves overnight. I was able to turn Advanced Data Protection on from my iPad without any problems. I confirmed it’s on from my iPhone as well (must wait until after work to fire up my Mac and confirm there). Given I was unable to activate it from any of my devices last night, I’m confident it’s good now.

So why did it need overnight to resolve? Maybe some batch process needed to run?

One interesting wrinkle in my case was that I had always had iCloud Keychain disabled on all my devices prior to yesterday. So after enabling it last night, maybe some things had to sort themselves out before my new account recovery key was fully recognized and ADP could be enabled….

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Bugs with setup of account recovery key & iCloud Advanced Data Protection

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