Keychains are a password storage facility of Mac OS X that lets you securely store your various passwords in a central place, so that you do not have to remember or retype your passwords all the time. Fetch supports keychains for plain FTP, SFTP, and FTP with TLS/SSL connections.

To save a password in your keychain for future use, check the Add to keychain checkbox in the New Connection dialog or Mirror Connection dialog. When you enter a password for a shortcut in the Edit Shortcut dialog, the password is automatically saved in your keychain.

After you enter a hostname, a username, and choose a connection type in the New Connection dialog, Fetch will check to see if a password matching that information has been saved in your keychain. If one has, it will be automatically entered in the Password field. Also, you will not be prompted for a password when using a shortcut or recent connection if the password for that connection is saved in your keychain.

To avoid being prompted for passwords when you use the Fetch widget, a droplet shortcut, or a mirror document, the password for any connections that will be used must be in the keychain.

While previous versions of Fetch allowed you to save a shortcut password in the shortcut itself, now all shortcut passwords are saved in your keychain. When you upgrade to Fetch 5.1 or later, your shortcut passwords will be automatically moved to the keychain if they are not stored there already.

Your keychain is usually automatically unlocked when you start or log in to Mac OS X.

Since Fetch 5.1 and later store passwords for shortcuts in your keychain, moving the shortcuts file from one Macintosh with Fetch 5.1 or later to another will move all the information about your shortcuts except the passwords. While one solution is to simply re-enter your passwords on the new Macintosh (where they will be saved in that Macintosh's keychain), you can also move your keychains to the new Macintosh.

If you want to move keychains between two Macintosh computers (perhaps because you want to move the shortcut passwords they contain), there are several ways to accomplish that: you can use .Mac syncing; the Mac OS X Migration Assistant should move keychain files between computers; or you can also follow the instructions for backing up and restoring keychains found in Mac OS X Help. Also see the Fetch Password FAQ help topic for information about how to reveal a shortcut's password using the Keychain Access application.

For more information about security in Fetch, see the Security help topic.

Table of contents