Yesterday I was really shocked. After reactivating my MacBook from stand-by mode I wanted to burn a DVD with exported pictures. I copied all files into the burning folder and started the process. From now on the whole system was curiously pretty slow. I never had this before. No idea if the burning process was responsible for that. But anyway, let us talk about the real problem…
I opened Adium to check if a friend is online. But instead of getting my contact list a password dialog was shown. Damn, what’s that? Most of my passwords are stored within Keychain. Why I have to enter a password now? Afraid of the thing happened I started the Keychain application and I was taken my breath away. No password, certificate or notes were visible. All entries were completely gone! The only thing I saw was a bright and white background. But that’s not what I wanted to see!
I was ebbed between waiting to finish the burning process or executing a restart immediately. Finally I decided to wait because there is no reason why it should getting worse. While the burning process wasn’t finished I restarted Keychain but without luck. It seems that all my stored sensitive data was lost. But stop! Let’s run a restart first… After taken the DVD out of my drive I did a restart. All the while I hold my fingers crossed. Please, please, please give me back my data… In such situations a restart takes a really long time! I entered my password and opened Keychain after my profile was loaded…
The applications window was shown and what I saw made me really really happy! All the entries were visible again and saved me from hacking them in again. I still have no idea what’s happened here and why they are back again. But I’m glad to have them back and I’m still interested for an explanation.
Anyone of you who had a similar experience? What was your result? Did you get back your stored passwords?
I lost my password to open the e-mail system
Andreas, Keychain has only forgotten one of your passwords? Did it return after a restart of OS X or is it still deleted?
I had a similar situation a few days back – Skype did somehow lose its password although I am sure it was stored in KeyChain, too.
Fortunately I remembered the email-address I registered with at skype 3 years ago, so I could use the “lost password” feature. :-/
And it wasn’t shown after a restart of OS X? Or haven’t you done this step?
Probably not of interest any more, since this is so long ago, but I had exactly the same problem just now: Skype (V2.7) on Mac OS X 10.5.5 losing its password, though it has been using it from the KeyChain all the time.
I thought I would have to reset my password on the Skype site, but then I found some advice to delete the KeyChain entry for “skype”. I restarted Skype and it logged in. The KeyChain entry was recreated automatically. I did not restart OS X.
Thanks Charlotte. But you had a different problem. In my case all the stored passwords were deleted. So there was no way to delete a not accepted one.
Alas, 5 years after this topic was brought up, OSX still has the the same problem.
After waking the computer, all of my email passwords were gone. In the past, I painstakingly re-added them usually after changing them again. Sure enough, this last time the passwords re-appeared after re-starting my computer.