How (and why) to generate a Recovery Key for your Apple ID

Image by carmen6969 from Pixabay

By Rick Rouse
Rick's Daily Tips

​With all the hacking going on these days it’s important to always keep your Apple ID and your devices as secure as possible.

If you want to enable the strongest possible level of security for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and/or other Apple devices, you can do so by generating a Recovery Key for your Apple ID.

What makes a Recovery Key so secure is YOU will be the only person who has access to it as long as you don’t share it with anyone or allow it to fall into someone else’s hands. And without the Recovery Key there is no getting into a device without the passcode. Period.

Once your Recovery Key has been created the Account Recovery tool will no longer work for your Apple ID, and that will prevent a thief, a snoop or anyone else from using one of your “trusted” devices to reset the password to your Apple ID.

Important notice…
Important: While having the Account Recovery tool disabled will greatly enhance the security of your Apple account and your devices, it will also take away one of the tools you could potentially use to reset your Apple ID password should the need ever arise.

All of your account recovery eggs will be in one basket: your Recovery Key.

Therefore, it’s absolutely imperative that you never lose your Recovery Key because without it you’ll be locked out of your Apple account and devices permanently if your passcode ever fails to work for some reason.

In other words, proceed with caution and safeguard your Recovery Key.

In a nutshell, a Recovery Key is a special randomly generated 28-character code that you can use to help reset your password and regain access to your Apple ID if you ever forget it (or if it simply stops working for some reason).

Keep this special code stored away in a safe place (or preferably, in several safe places) and you won’t ever have to worry about getting permanently locked out of your Apple account and/or Apple devices in the future.

Now that the warnings are out of the way, if you want to ensure that your Apple ID and devices have the ultimate in security in place, you can generate a Recovery Key by following the steps on this page.

And now, I’ll just finish up with this…
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Did I mention how important it is that you never lose your Recovery Key, or share it with another person?