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Comment by xmddmx | Hacker News Reader

Disturbing if true, as it suggests my "everything" backups aren't really full backups at all.

I wonder, if you have enabled iCloud keychain, does that provide another way to get your passwords back?

Suppose my MacBook is stolen, but I still have my iPhone. Could I use the passwords app on the iPhone to retrieve my passwords. Would that include all of them or only a subset?

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The iCloud keychain is separate from the login keychain. The Passwords app doesn't use the login keychain.

Even more confusing. Do we know which data is in which keychain?

Look in the Keychain Access app.

I have no idea which keychain is in which, but the last time I migrated from one Apple laptop to another, I couldn't get the automated tool to work at all, so I restored a physical backup, went through the sign-in process, and passwords and passkeys migrated correctly.

Passwords and passkeys are in the iCloud keychain. You can technically save passwords in the login keychain (not sure about passkeys), but if you’re using the Passwords app it will be in the iCloud one.

> Disturbing if true, as it suggests my "everything" backups aren't really full backups at all.

Randomly, Chromium-based browser profiles can't perfectly copy across macOS machines either, because of some HMAC hashing that happens to extensions.

You don't have any backups at all if you never tried restoring and testing them

This is so critical. Not just verifying the hashes, not just restoring, but actually booting into it and opening the top 5-10 things you're going to care about.

If it's your personal stuff, skip it at your own peril. If it's a paid responsibility, that's what hourly billing is for (this incentive was much stronger when I learned netadmin, back before nvmes)

I tested restoring my restic backups to the same PC and it worked. If I was forced to use a mac and Apple's password manager, I'd probably do the same test, conclude it worked, and then later lose all my data. If you care about keeping your data, there's no substitute for understand how things work.

It's unreasonable to ask everyone to own a second computer just to test restoring backups on, and it sounds like doing the test on the same computer wouldn't have caught this problem.

> doing the test on the same computer wouldn't have caught this problem.

Doing it on a second computer wouldn't have caught this problem either with macOS 26.3 and earlier, because it was introduced in 26.4.

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