MacOS – How to recover lost secure notes in Keychain

keychainmacos

I have been having problems is Messages. One post suggested chucking your login.keychain. This caused my secure notes to vanish.

Restoring this file from time machine (~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain) did not help.

In answer to comment below:

Quit Keychain Access
Renamed login.keychain
Restored from the 7:31 backup this morning.
Restored ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple/keychainaccess.plist

Restarted Keychain Access

No secure notes.

Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite

Best Answer

Stupid, silly me.

The left column has a pane for Keychains and a pane for categories.

The keychain pane has

  • login
  • local items
  • System
  • System Roots.

The Category pane has

  • All Items
  • Passwords
  • Secure Notes
  • My Certificates
  • Keys
  • Certificates.

These two are in essence multipied together. That is, ANY of the keychains can have any of the categories.

In my wanderings I was somehow clicked into local items instead of login. I had not created a local items secure note, so of course secure notes was blank.

Embarrassing as it is, I'm leaving this up for future klutzes.

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