Fetch Help > Concepts > Keychain Support

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 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.

The simplest solution, especially if you just have a few passwords, is to re-enter your passwords on the new Macintosh (where they will be saved in that Macintosh's keychain). Otherwise, see the moving keychains and passwords to another Macintosh help topic for more options.

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