Sage advice to overcome Mac maladies
Shine a spotlight on sagacious solutions to your most maddening Mac maladies
Missing passwords after update
Q Installing a Safari update became stuck, so I restarted my Mac. When the update completed, the new version couldn’t access my old passwords. I tried restoring my keychain, which is local (not iCloud), but Time Machine says it can’t do that. How can I get my passwords back?
ALook in the Keychains folder in your Home folder’s Library – in Finder, hold
å and choose Go > Library. Among other files, you should see a keychain there named login.keychain-db, which is your user account’s current (login) keychain. View its contents using Keychain Access, which you’ll find in /Applications/Utilities.
If that login keychain is almost empty, your previous keychain became damaged, perhaps when your Mac restarted during the update, and macOS has replaced the old one with a new, almost empty one.
You can still restore a keychain from before the update, but under a different name. Then, use Keychain Access to copy passwords and other items from the old keychain and paste them into the current one, although that becomes tedious. With each paste you’ll normally be prompted to authenticate with your user account’s password.
Also check in Safari’s preferences that AutoFill is turned on for ‘User names and passwords’. (Note that in Safari 11.1 or later, you must interact with a form before AutoFill offers you a choice of data to populate it with.)
Safari can keep some usernames and passwords in the Local Items keychain, which may also be listed in Keychain Access’s left pane. You may also see older keychains with names like login_renamed, which are created when there are problems with the regular login keychain. Once your login keychain is up to scratch again, you should be able to trash all those old renamed versions.