Revisiting; How to Remove an External Drive Password from Keychain

Question

Revisiting; How to Remove an External Drive Password from Keychain

This is a copy paste of an original question by @Nevada_Princess as I also have this situation with one of my external SSDs:

Can anyone tell me how do remove the stored password for an external drive?

I have several external drives attached to my iMac, all password protected.

For added security when I enter the passwords, I do NOT add them to my Keychain.

Unfortunately, for one of these I accidentally did. While it simplifies boot up by not having to enter the password, I'd nonetheless like to remove it.

I've searched high and low for how to do this, but I can't find anything either inside the Keychain or any solution on a web search.

Thanks...Any help much appreciated!

Mac Studio, macOS 15.1

Posted on Jan 19, 2025 12:31 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 19, 2025 6:25 AM in response to veggiegalactic

EVERYTHING in the keychain is encrypted at least once, and locked (by default) with your login password.

The ease with which YOU can see the passwords is only because MacOS works hard to "get out of your way' and help you accomplish what you want. if you delete those passwords, you will have to manually enter those drive passwords EVERY time you want access to these drives for ANY reason, including backups.

Anyone else who tries to read the keychain get encrypted nonsense.

You could remove those passwords, but but if you cannot produce them when needed, the data on those drives is gone forever. The is far more likely to cause YOU to lose data than to add tangible protection from data theft. Your encrypted drives are already well protected.

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