Sequoia: Keychain Access cannot create a new secure note

Vladimiro Sassone1 wrote:

vital information for me, losing would be catastrophic.

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

You can use a locked note. You can use an encrypted drive. If you don't want to turn on FileVault, then you can encrypt an external drive with a different password and use that. You can create an encrypted disk image.

Doogy wrote:

This is and will be a very troublesome situation for me!!!!

hundreds and hundreds of secure notes and passwords on multiple mac since introduction of the keychain access on mac os x!!! with oldest mac now with high sierra and newest just upgraded to sequoia and realizing this hectic issue to come soon!!!

why why why!!!??? Apple…

What exactly is the problem right now? Keychain Access is still on your Mac. Mine still has the secure notes I created long ago.

I am disappointed with the deprecation of creating new Keychain iCloud Secure Notes too. Will our old secured notes still be there? If so, I found that I can just reuse old notes. That seems to work for me (That is, supplementing old notes with new information).

HELP PLEASE! ! How do I get into my Secure Note? .... I have hundreds of PWs and records in Keychain /Secure Note that I can no longer access .!&^##*!!??! I read now this is related to my updating to Sequoia!!!! Without access to these PWs I am lost, blocked for work I need to do, and angry! BAH!

BruceH2013 wrote:

Hi DNoreen,

The answer to your question is in this thread already but Apple make it hard to find because, by default, they don't display the messages in order. :-(

Change to "sort by oldest" and then read through and you'll find your answer.

The default sort, order of highest rated, should provide the answer at the top. However, most people like to upvote the whining, not the solution as if that is somehow helpful.

Two solutions...

For storing extra info with a password; for example, the subscription key for the products associated with the login. In the new Passwords app you can edit a password entry--analogous to editing a contact. Locate the item and "edit" it. Then put info in the Notes field. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2022/04/29/how-to-add-notes-to-icloud-keychain-passwords/

For saving secure info that's not associated with a specific login. Create a Notes entry and lock it with a password. In the previous Keychain Access app you could have a password on a complete keychain. The same password protected all notes in the keychain. In Notes you could use the same password for each note in a group of secure notes. FYI, I chose to put these notes in iCloud so I could access them across my devices. To help find them I created a Notes folder for my "secure" notes.

Now to figure out how to export secure notes from Keychain Access. May be easy, just haven't looked.

Looks like one way and I've already started experimenting with it. But do note (see my comment above/below) that in the new Passwords app you can attach notes to a password--much like attaching notes to a Contacts app entry.

I actually like the Notes app so this is an easy transition for me. I keep a lot of, well, notes in Notes and Freeform. Both are compatible with the Apple Pencil on my iPad. (At least the second-gen Apple Pencil.)

Looks like it, just manually copied all my "Secure notes" from Keychain Access to Notes.

A bit frustrating but on the positive side they're more easily synched to my iOS devices.

Scared of loosing them if Apple suddenly decides to drop Keychain Access all together..

What I did was name the "password" entry as the name of the note (it doesn't seem to require a URL for the "password" entry. so I treated it like the title of the note.

if the note relates to something like a server, cert, GitHub repository or whatever I put in the account name and same for password.

now as this is a note not an actual account I could put anything in the account name and password just to get past the internal verifications of actually having an entry. but it's all bogus.

Then in the actual notes field I put my note sort of similar in a way to how you could create a secure note in keychain previously.

and I know for a fact this note will be always encrypted in transit and will be available to my phone and tablet.

and yes it could have been a bit clearer as to how to do all of this rather than simply say oh there is a new app and we moved a bunch of stuff to the new app and removed it from the old app; but we're keeping parts of the old app around just to create even more confusion.

I'm kind of late coming to this discussion, having just bought a new Airbook with Sequoia 15.2 installed. I haven't set up the new Password program yet. I'm scared, and have a few questions before I do that. 1) In that process, will it import ANY of my saved passwords that I have in Keychain Access? 2) And, I had a lot of Secure Notes (over 150). All this talk about KeyChain Access becoming extinct worries me. Sounds like I have to copy and paste them one at a time into the Notes program in order not to lose them eventually? 3) One final question, what should the settings be in iCloud? I turned a lot of program accesses off and stopped synching with my phone because I had was getting multiple duplicate phone numbers in Contacts on the iPhone. So, I really don't know how I should set up iCloud. Any tips? If this is too much, and I should split my questions up and repost as different topics, please let me know. Any help would be most appreciated.

When I open Keychain Access, it looks like all my secure notes are gone from my login keychain. But if I select the iCloud keychain then go back to my login keychain, my secure notes magically appear. It's a bug. I can edit existing notes but I can't create new notes. I'm now creating new notes in a new Accounts folder in the Notes app. They can be locked and they are stored in iCloud and so are available on my iPhone.

Yes this is helpful… but these notes are not available when creating the Password, only after it is created and then ‘Edited’ The most helpful thing about a secure note in Keychain was the ability to cut and paste screen shots, images, materials with design, and also to style your notes and style related info. Those 3 security questions and answers as a screen grab was super handy for storing with a secure note in keychain. Another key aspect was font selection for the note.

I've just run into this and super unhappy.

I use keychain to make notes about lots of things I like to keep secure and add photos and documents to the note.

Example is passports, I keep a copy of family passports details with a scan of the passport. Same with credit cards.

it's a goto place to store that detail.

Just tried adding an entry in notes and securing it. Now I can't remember the password I originally used years ago for securing notes, ironically I can't find that password in keychain,

would be useful if you could lock a whole folder in notes instead of only locking individual notes