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I've done Tahoe-to-Tahoe migration assistant moves between machines in recent months. No issues with login keychain migration.

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But that’s not backup restore? I’m thinking Time Machine restore on a new Mac when old one is no longer working. Or when the old one had to be wiped and restored.

Migration Assistant uses the old Mac, which can unlock its login keychain and allow the keychain items to be copied.

What if the old Mac is dead, stolen, lost? Those are the scenarios in which one recovers on a new machine from a backup.

What information from your login keychain do you expect to need on your new computer?

There's not really a plausible answer to that question, because the login keychain data is almost entirely specific to that host.

To iron-man your argument: Apps that store account credentials to third party services will need to be signed in again.

If you were using http basic auth for a website and saving that, then it was probably in there.

Private keys and certificates you manually imported, or that were created by an application for your host. This is the closest to a plausible answer, imo.

> What information from your login keychain do you expect to need on your new computer?

Pretty much everything?

Then you're in trouble.

Migration assistant can also use a TM backup, I’m pretty sure

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