Yikes! Where did my Keychain go?!

All of a sudden Mail was reporting login errors, Fetch was throwing a wobbly, Tweets weren’t appearing in Tweetie… and websites were asking for a login… what was going on? Answer…

The ‘login’ Keychain was corrupted!

How this happened I do not know. I launched Keychain Access (in the Utilities folder in Applications) and there was no login keychain listed. A quick repair (Keychain First Aid, in the Keychain menu) restored the login keychain – phew! But, the keychain was empty, so Mail, Fetch etc. still did not work.

Time Machine to the rescue!

First, I quit Keychain Access. I then went in to the last Time Machine backup (when the login keychain was still working), and tracked down the backed-up login keychain (/User/Your User Name/Library/Keychains) and copied over to the equivalent folder on the Mac. (Just for good measure I then restarted the Mac – this may not be necessary).

Once the Mac was back up and running I re-opened Keychain Access, and there in the login keychain were all my settings, and Mail, Fetch, Tweetie etc. were now all working…. Excellent.

Morale of this story? Backup!!!