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Sync Your Keychain on iCloud

The move from MobileMe to iCloud saw a number of services dropped that some of us had come to depend on. There’s a way to get at least some of them back.

Keychain Sync

On one of your Macs:

mv ~/Library/Keychains ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/
ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/Keychains ~/Library/Keychains

Then on each of the other Macs:

mv ~/Library/Keychains ~/Desktop
ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/Keychains ~/Library/Keychains

iDisk / Dropbox

You can of course use this trick to create yourself  a little iDisk/Dropbox too:

On one of your Macs:

mkdir ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk
ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk ~/iDisk

Then on each of the other Macs:

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk ~/iDisk

Warning: This isn't actually going to merge multiple changes to your keychain – the latest one modified will prevail – and so if for some reason you deleted it from one Mac (or signed out of iCloud), it would also go on the others. The behaviour is also uncertain if two copies changed simultaneously. 

 

Caveat: Don’t blame me if this doesn’t work / you lose all of your data / this breaks the ToS for your iCloud account.

 

2 Comments

  1. rob wrote:

    I’ve just received the warning I need to upgrade my mobile me…. how is this fix working out for you? This is the one thing that really drives me mad about iCloud…

    Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 09:47 | Permalink
  2. It worked for a while for me, then one of my Macs got confused and created a second Mobile Documents directory and from then on would ask for my iCloud credentials which was annoying. I fixed that once, using some cunning removing-and-adding-of-iCloud but it could come back. How are you still using MobileMe? Just via web, or have you stuck to Snow Leopard?

    It’s sounding like Mountain Lion might reintroduce some of the lost MobileMe syncing functionality – look at the “Many USers One Account” section in this article at MacWorld. That would be great if true.

    Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 09:57 | Permalink

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