By itself, a Recovery Key has no value: someone needs that plus one of your trusted devices or your password. And you need to ask yourself whether anyone else you know or any other location can be trusted with it, so that you’re not a single point of failure. Now, whether or not you just reset your Recovery Key, you need to keep good track of it from now on. Unlike Google, which gives you 10 recovery codes at a time, you only get one valid iCloud Recovery Key. Lose the Recovery Key, and you can log in and generate a new one. If you lose all your trusted devices, you can use your password and Recovery Key to add new ones. If you lose your password, you enter the Recovery Key and get a message on a trusted iOS device or phone. (Owen had a happy ending: Digging through Time Machine backups, he eventually found a picture he’d taken that had the key and was able to get back into his account.)Īpple built two-step verification around the notion that you’ll always have access to at least two of three things: your password, a trusted device, and your Recovery Key. If you can’t find it, it’s past time to reset your Recovery Key and figure out a better way to retain it. It’s time to rummage through your records and make sure you have what you need to prevent someone’s attempt to poke your account-or you fumble-finger entering the wrong password a few too many times in a row-into a digital-life disaster. Some of us set up two-factor authentication nearly two years ago when Apple first offered it. The fact that an attacked account is locked means that a malicious party could even weaponize that behavior into you losing your account access forever if you don’t know where you stashed your Recovery Key.

Without your Recovery Key, Apple can’t let you back into your iCloud account-and you’ll lose everything you don’t have backed up locally. (The one exception: FileVault offers an escrow option for your drive recovery key, but even then you have to provide precise information to Apple to unlock the encryption that’s surrounding your key.) If it has the secrets, then attackers can gain them, too, or it can be compelled to surrender them to government agents. Apple doesn’t retain information in a way that lets it gain access without key pieces of data or devices only you possess.

Apple has designed its two-step recovery system, just like iOS 8’s passcode protection and Mac OS X’s FileVault encryption, so that if the necessary credentials are lost, the firm cannot recover your data. He couldn’t find his Recovery Key, and Apple said without it, his account data and access would be lost forever.Īnd that’s true. Owen Williams of The Next Web documented the many hours of cold sweats he went through after someone attempted to crack his account, and Apple disabled normal access, as described in this support document.

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