.Mac is fickle sometimes. In just this week alone we've had 3 customers report problems syncing their keychain with .Mac accounts. So, I thought I'd share a little tutorial on the first step I always try when .Mac gets out-of-sync: Manually reset your .Mac keychain data with the correct data.
When .Mac refuses to sync, sometimes it just needs a little coaxing. The following steps will force .Mac to update its data to keychain from your one Mac and force .Mac to update the keychains on your other Mac.
As always, the first step before any change is to backup your information. The keychains are stored in this folder:
/Users/your-user-id/Library/Keychains
Back that folder up on both your machines.
Now, on to business. We want to first copy your good keychain to .Mac, so on the "good" machine open the .Mac preferences from System Preferences:
Then go to the Advanced tab and click on Reset Sync Data:
Tell .Mac to replace its copy of the keychains with the copy of the keychains on your working machine. See the screenshot below:
Notice the arrow goes from the local machine to .Mac, indicating that the .Mac copy will be replaced by the local machines data. Also note that "Replace" dropdown has Keychains selected; this way none of your other .Mac data will be affected.
After you click Replace .Mac should now have the good copy of your keychains.
You can now go to your second machine and do the reverse, but beware that it sometimes takes a while for .Mac to get updated, up to several minutes in fact. We had one customer from Europe report in the forum that it took over 7 minutes before the data was updated.
Once you waited a bit for the .Mac servers to get organized, tell .Mac to replace the keychains on the local mcahine with the ones from .Mac. Here's the screen in action:
This time notice the arrow goes from .Mac to your local machine, meaning your local keychains will be overwritten by the copy on the .Mac server. Once again, the Replace dropdown has keychains selected.
Once completed you should have the same keychains on all machines. Once you have forced this once the .Mac syncing seems to "wake up" and start behaving correctly.
So, that's my trick for forcing .Mac to work. Do you have any other tricks to make this beast behave? Please share in the comments.
