Help with Keychains on a MacBook

I think I ruined everything. :frowning: I couldn’t quit mail (the computer wouldn’t let me; finally did a hard boot–after I messed it all up, of course).

Mail kept asking me for my keychain password–something it’s never done before. I have changed nothing recently on my laptop. So, like a good scout, I went into Keychain access and tried to follow the directions. I found the help menu and followed it… and here is where I got into trouble. Help was er, helpful, but there was this one certificate from a site I used in grad school and stupid me thought, “well, let’s clean this up–no need for that anymore!” so I clicked “delete”–thinking it would only delete that one cert.

They’re ALL gone. The screen is blank. There are no keychains on my puter now that I can find. I then tried to turn the computer off and it wouldn’t let me, saying that I needed to quit Mail (very funny, computer) to do so, so I did a hard boot. The first screen that came up was the Keychain one–again blank, sadly enough. I can get online and I can (now) get my mail–haven’t tried to send anything as yet. But what do I do to restore the keychains? I did the verify and repair to no avail.

  1. Am I making sense to anyone out there?

  2. Is there any help for me?

  3. Can I restore these keychains? Do I need to?

  4. When will I ever learn enough about this magical box?

Thanks in advance to all who respond. I appreciate your patience with me.

OK, first of all don’t panic. :slight_smile:

Keychains are there to make your life easier - They store passwords and auto-fill information for all kinds of programs on your machine. For example, all of your passwords for websites you’ve visited are stored in the keychain, so if you’ve deleted it, you are going to have to re-enter the information. More to the point, your user name and password for all your mail accounts is stored in a keychain, so if this is gone, Mail will ask you to sign in the next time it’s launched.

Since you’ve nuked your keychains, just start filling in information as programs asks for it.

(BTW, this is one reason I try to emphasize to all my clients that they should have a system for recording all of their username / password combinations. It’s real easy to let the computer remember everything for you, until something like this happens…)

As beowulff said, you will may have to re-enter saved passwords in programs that used Keychain. It’s not limited to your e-mail program or a web browser (but those are the most common use cases.)

I would recommend, if you have many different passwords to save, that you buy a password manager program. Many of those can be also used to save things like PIN numbers and other confidential information. I use an older one called WebConfidential, but many are available, such as

http://www.keepassx.org/

http://gravityapps.com/steel/

The advantage with using another program is that you can store your passwords in a file and also back up that file to another location (a USB thumb drive, external hard drive) so that you won’t be stuck if ever your hard drive crashes. I suppose you could back up your keychain file, but with a third-party program you can choose where to put your encrypted file containing passwords, and you can put the encrypted file in a location that gets regularly backed up.