Keychains are some of the most important, and hard to replace, data on your Mac and iOS devices. Lose access to all those passwords and certificates, and doing almost anything becomes a purgatory of resetting passwords and trying to convince support desks of your identity. As many of us now rely on robust synthetic passwords, which are difficult even to write down, let alone key in, our keychains are crucial.
Unless you’re using a single Mac and have no iOS devices, by now you’ve probably succumbed to storing your keychain in iCloud. This is far more reliable than when Apple first encouraged us to trust it, and despite my original opposition, even I now use it.
Apple details iCloud Keychain in this note, where it refers to keychain recovery. What isn’t made clear there is that if you inadvertently do something to mutilate or destroy your iCloud Keychain, including making several incorrect attempts to access it, or deleting a whole batch of passwords, then there’s no backup of your keychain in iCloud from which you can restore it, as far as anyone has been able to discover.
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