Unable to Export Mac Passwords
I create periodic CSV password backups on the Macs that I manage. After the recent 1Password story, I was feeling good that at least I shouldn’t have to worry about the Passwords app not launching. But it turns out that, today, Apple’s app didn’t work, either.
After telling it to export everything (except the passkeys, which are not exportable), it asked for the user’s password twice but then failed to save the file or report an error. This happened several times. I saw some vague CloudKit errors in Console, but it wasn’t clear they were related to the export. And shouldn’t it be able to export the locally stored data without going to the cloud?
Then I noticed that the passwords in the app were stale—the last modification was more than a month ago. Had it stopped syncing with iCloud Keychain? I could find no indication of that in Passwords or in System Settings, though it’s not as if there’s an easily accessible sync status indicator or log.
I tried the all-purpose remedy: signing out of iCloud. This made things worse because when I signed back in it wouldn’t accept any device passwords, even though I’m sure that I entered three different ones correctly. It kept saying:
Verification Failed
There was an error verifying the passcode of your iPhone.
Now I was stuck with the dreaded “Some iCloud Data Isn’t Syncing” error in System Settings, with no access to any end-to-end encrypted data. (I’d been almost ready to enable to iCloud Advanced Data Protection, but now I wonder whether that’s a bad idea because it increases the likelihood of a bug or server problem locking me out of my own data.) Exporting from Passwords still failed without reporting an error. And, because I had to sign out of iCloud in order to sign out of iCloud Keychain, I now had 80K photos that needed to be redownloaded.
I thought maybe there was a temporary server glitch. Of course, the iCloud status page showed nothing. I waited a few hours and tried again, but it still didn’t accept my device passwords.
What finally worked was reinstalling macOS. That allowed me to fully sign into iCloud, passwords started syncing again, and exporting suddenly worked.
Previously:
- Lost Access to 1Password Mac Apps
- Locked Down Passkey and Keychain Backups
- Security Keys for Apple ID
- Why Apple Asks for Your Other Device’s Password
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I know it's 2026, but keypass files are pretty great and lots of applications read them.
When I noticed stale passwords on one of my Macs recently, the fix was to turn off syncing for iCloud Passwords & Keychain, restarting, and then turning it back on. Did you try that as well or did you go straight for the iCloud sign-out?
