How to disable the Local Items keychain?

Hi,

Is it possible to completely disable Keychain Access' "local items" feature?

Use case

I have two main keychains: the Login keychain, and the "Local Items" keychain. I suspect the Local Items keychain was created a long time ago when I once enabled iCloud Keychain, and then disabled it (I would like to avoid storing my passwords in iCloud).

Now, it appears that all passwords stored by Safari are stored in the Local Items keychain. So, it is crucial for me to make backups of this keychain. This special keychain is stored in ~/Library/Keychains like the Login keychain, except it is not stored as a .keychain file, but in a folder named after my Mac UUID. Both keychains are correctly backed up by Time Machine, so, I have been assuming so far that I am safe.

However, recently I have found numerous articles on the web that report that the Local Items keychain cannot be restored to another Mac with a different UUID. This would mean that, if my Mac dies (and considering how slow my hard drive has become, I expect this could happen any time soon), I will loose all passwords in my Local Items keychain. This is obviously not acceptable.

What I've tried so far

Copying all passwords from the Local Items keychain to the Login keychain

This is possible, but it requires a trick, because you will be prompted for your password for each and every single password you want to copy. My Local Items keychain contains 500+ passwords, so this would be a no-go. The trick I have found online is to temporarily set the password for your Login keychain to the empty string (notice you cannot change the password of your Local Items keychain; this menu item is greyed out). You will need to Option-click on OK in the dialog otherwise Keychain Access will not let you set an empty password. Then, you will still be prompted for your password for each item, but all you need to do is press enter 500 times, so this will only take a few minutes if you type very fast, rather than a few days.

This mostly worked for me, except that it failed on duplicate items, which need to be resolved manually. It also showed an error message on at least one item, complaining it could not read its contents. I don't know how to figure out on which item this happened. The duplicate failures were logged in the Console (although the log entries do not mention the name of the item), but I could not find log entries for the other failures.

Deleting the Local Items keychain

The Local Items keychain cannot be deleted from Keychain Access; the menu item is greyed out. But you can just delete the folder in ~/Library/Keychains. A reboot will then be necessary, because the contents of the Local Items keychain are cached in RAM.

However, after this procedure, a new Local Items keychain will automatically be re-created, and Safari will continue storing passwords in there. Back to step 1.

Any suggestions on how to address this?

Thanks in advance