The other day I wanted to update an important document. This document is so important that I have made it password-protected from inside Pages, the Macintosh word processor. Unfortunately, I lost the password some years ago. This never bothered me, as the Mac OS remembers the password and automatically supplies it so that my lost password isn’t a problem.
But this time I had a series of major changes I needed to make, so I decided to be very careful. First, I duplicated the file. Then I went to work on the duplicated file, leaving the original untouched. This insured that, should something go wrong, I would have the original in good shape. I made lots of changes to the new file, saved it, and quit.
The next day I was ready to make some more changes, so I opened the new file. Pages presented me with this:
Um, gee, I thought, why does it want the password now? It already knows the password. What gives?
I was screwed. I didn’t know the password, so I could not recover the new document with all those changes. I went into the Passwords panel in System Preferences so that I could at least find the password stored there. Alas! It was NOT stored in the internal passwords file. I was screwed, screwed, screwed.
When I duplicated the file, the Mac OS duplicated the requirement for the password, but not the password itself. Why did it duplicate one but not the other? Because the Apple programmers are idiots!