> How to move a keychain

I need to copy my keychain from my last Mac, and was surprised to find two files for its login keychain. Which one should I copy?

Until the release of macOS Sierra in 2016, your Mac’s main keychain was kept in login. keychain in the Keychains folder in your Home folder Library. macOS then changed to using an encrypted database stored in login.keychain-db instead, and that is the keychain which you should copy across.

Copying keychains isn’t always a success: it’s a good way to preserve access to the passwords and certificates kept in it, but unless they’re copied from there into the active keychain, you’ll probably have to keep unlocking that old keychain manually. There are two ways around this. One is to migrate from the older system, during which all old entries will be copied across to your new keychain. Or use Keychain in iCloud to share the contents of the old keychain, which will ensure they’re available to a new system which is also sharing the same account.

Sharing an old keychain using iCloud is a good way of ensuring that its passwords are copied across to a new Mac.