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keychain gone after reinstall.

I have an iMac Late 2015 (OS X El Capitan) I use this as my daily driver, all of my passwords is stored in Safari and Keychain.

In my iCloud settings i have the following enabled; see below.User uploaded file


Today I resinstalled my OS X, signed in to iCloud and every password was gone?!? Even in Safari, but my bookmarks and history was intact.

This results in that I cannot login to some sites due to my confidence in keychain..



-Isn't the "keychain"-sync option supposed to restore it to what ever device I use my account on?

-Any advice on how I can restore my old keychain, or at least what I can do to prevent this from happening in the future?


Thanks in advance.

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan

Posted on Mar 17, 2017 2:36 PM

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Posted on Mar 17, 2017 7:42 PM

Login to iCloud.com. Some features have a history so you can restore items. Frankly I don't trust iCloud keychain so I don't know if it has that ability. It is in the gear of the settings if I recall correctly.


As far as I can tell iCloud is a 'last change wins' sync solution. I guess the cloud thought your last action was to delete everything. The keychain is not included in backups if you use iCloud for backups so restoring won't help either it's mentioned near the bottom…

Get help using iCloud Keychain - Apple Support


So do you use Time Machine or any other backup systems?

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Mar 17, 2017 7:42 PM in response to jiggydeluxe

Login to iCloud.com. Some features have a history so you can restore items. Frankly I don't trust iCloud keychain so I don't know if it has that ability. It is in the gear of the settings if I recall correctly.


As far as I can tell iCloud is a 'last change wins' sync solution. I guess the cloud thought your last action was to delete everything. The keychain is not included in backups if you use iCloud for backups so restoring won't help either it's mentioned near the bottom…

Get help using iCloud Keychain - Apple Support


So do you use Time Machine or any other backup systems?

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Mar 17, 2017 6:57 PM in response to jiggydeluxe

This can certainly be frustrating... Do you happen to know if iCloud Keychain was enabled on your Mac before your reinstalled OS X? Also, I'd make sure that Keychain doesn't need to activated? Your Mac may require you to approve usage of the Keychain on another device signed in to your Apple ID.

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Mar 18, 2017 1:36 AM in response to Drew Reece

I tried logging in to iCloud and I did not have any option to restore my keychain, I only had some bookmarks.


However, 'the last change wins' got me thinking, so I booted up my Macbook Pro which I have not used in a month, a fraction of my former keychain was still on the MBP.

I opened up "Keychain Access" on the MBP, let it sit for a couple of minutes and it synced to my iMac!!


It seems like you need to have another device with the former keychain on it for it to work, a very bad idea really..

What if I didn't have another IOS/OSX device, would I not be able to recover my 100+ passwords and logins??


I guess this is sort of solved, however I would like the option to sync my keychain to iCloud server so I don't have to rely on having another Apple device lying around just for this kind of stuff 😕



Thank you for helping Drew, and Jake3231. I really appreciate it!!

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Sep 1, 2017 10:15 AM in response to Jake3231

Believe me after my experiences of trying to disable/enable iCloud keychain on my devices (MBP, iPad and iPhone 7), I have seen passwords missing in iCloud keychain...It is a serious BUG. And many people who think they would have got their passwords back due to iCloud keychain may not notice there probably were few passwords missing.


That would happen because they would have had many logins stored and if few went missing, they wouldnt realise that till they have to use that website login and password.


Just to understand the functioning of iCloud keychain, I have been playing around enabling and disabling keychain on my Macbook pro, while I did this I have made sure the iCloud keychain on atleast one of my devices was switched on. Inspite of this (keeping iCloud keychain enabled on my device), as soon as I have enabled the iCloud keychain back on my MBP, there were two or three missing passwords and I have immediately checked my iPhone to see if they would be available there at least. They would gone on my iPhone too. This is really really low standards for iCloud keychain.


Out of my repeated experiments I have realized, though iCloud keychain will keep most of the passwords there is no guarantee at all that all of them would be recovered....I would bet my MBP on that....

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keychain gone after reinstall.

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