Recovery Key questions

[romanof]

There is no security forum, so I have defaulted to here.

A few questions about recovery key(s). Apparently it has changed over time, and my searches keep coming up with conflicting information.

I know what it is and what it is for, but do you have one for each device, or just one overall? My searching finds that the answer is yes and no. The two Apple articles I have found also seem to give both answers.

Plus there are many warnings that it doesn't work yet on IOS 14, although most of those hits are from right after 14 came out. Is it fixed, or was never a problem?

I would hate to mis-install something as absolute as this and lock myself out of everything.

Anybody?

 

[Apple_Robert]

The Recovery Key is for your Apple ID account to help keep it more secure. There are not multiple recovery keys for different devices.

 

[chown33]

There is no security forum, so I have defaulted to here.

I'll leave the thread where it is for now, but it may be moved later. If it is, a redirect will be left here.

A few questions about recovery key(s). Apparently it has changed over time, and my searches keep coming up with conflicting information.

I know what it is and what it is for, but do you have one for each device, or just one overall? My searching finds that the answer is yes and no. The two Apple articles I have found also seem to give both answers.

Which two Apple articles? Please provide links, so we know what you've read. This is important because "Recovery Key" can mean different things (see below).

Plus there are many warnings that it doesn't work yet on IOS 14, although most of those hits are from right after 14 came out. Is it fixed, or was never a problem?

I would hate to mis-install something as absolute as this and lock myself out of everything.

Anybody?

As mentioned already, there is a Recovery Key you can enable for your AppleID account.

There is also a FileVault Recovery Key, which can be stored with your AppleID account, but can also be stored offline, completely under your control.

Protect data on your Mac with FileVault

Turn on FileVault to add an extra layer of security to the encrypted data on your Mac.

support.apple.com

Then there's an Institutional Recovery Key, which sysadmins at an institution (e.g. school, company, etc.) can make and manage. It's appropriate for Managed Device (MDM) profiles.

How to use institutional recovery keys with Intel-based Macs - Apple Support

Learn how to create an institutional recovery key (IRK) to unlock FileVault-encrypted Intel-based Mac computers and recover data.

support.apple.com

 

[romanof]

Just talking about the plain Apple ID account. Thanks Apple_Robert. If those simple sentences had been used by Apple, they could have left all all the verbose gab.

chown33: I will have to back trace and find the articles - I read a bunch. One of the reasons for my confusion is because the major flaws (imho) of search engines (anybody's) is that the default results are not sorted in order of date. Can't count the number of times I wondered why my search result doesn't seem to match my condition, then see that it is dated five years and six versions ago. They need an option (like Amazon) - just give me the result from the past 3 months, or 2021, or whatever.

Thanks all.

 

[Maclver]

I just turned it on for my ID, but kind of confused. On the main page it shows the Recovery Key is "off", but when you click manage, it shows "On". So is it on or off?