Ok apparently this is just another "thing apple drops the ball on". After spending a couple of days or more looking for the solution to this problem I finally found out there is none.
Why?
Mavericks doesn't bother saving your website passwords if you elect not to use iCloud to synch your passwords.
For some unknowable reason they aren't saved in the login.keychain file, they are saved in the Local Items database which appears in Keychain Access below login and System. After screwing with this for 2 days I finally clicked on Local Items and discovered the few passwords that I'd reset since reinstalling Mavericks. From what I've been reading on the web this comes from a database file in a uuid folder which is located in the User's Keychains folder. However for yet another unknowable reason, although Time Machine backs this file up it is not restorable. You get all sorts of errors when you try to copy it into the current installation. I haven't spent too much time on this since I read that, but I did try to restore it from Time Machine and got an error message so I give up.
Apparently some of you don't suffer from this problem: Good for you more power to you. But for me this is how Mavericks stores my passwords. So anybody who wants to know you can save the Local Items manually by creating a new keychain, copying all your passwords stored in Local Items into the new keychain, then moving the new keychain file somewhere else on your computer so you can reverse the process if you need to recover your passwords in the future. You do this by importing the keychain you saved in Keychain Access then recopying everything back into your current Local Items keychain. For my setup when I did this I had to put my password in twice for each item I copied. I thought it wasn't working and cancelled it only to discover there were a few passwords copied, so I just started where I left off, 23 passwords times 2!
Thanks Apple, I really enjoyed this little project. NOT!
I'm new at posting since you can usually find answers using the google. So I'm not sure if I'm supposed to do something to close this thread but none of the answers resolved it so I'm leaving it for now. Will check back to see if I missed something.
