Google Chrome macOS: transfer all user profiles and passwords

Question

To have a backup to my main Mac, I bought another one with basic specs. I manage a lot of social media profiles and therefore have a lot of chrome profiles to manage different business logins, email addresses, instagram profiles etc. and the Chrome profile switcher is very helpful at that.

To mirror my current Chrome environment to the second Mac, I have quit Chrome on both devices and then airdropped the whole ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome folder and put it in the same place on the new Mac.

To my surprise, it actually does show all the different profiles on the new Mac which is good. Even the bookmarks show up correctly, awesome. Unfortunately, the cookies or log in tokens etc. and the passwords seem to sit somewhere else, I'm not logged into any website on the new Mac. I found the password export/import feature which is a tedious task for 40+ profiles but while the export really does show all the passwords in plain text, the import feature does not seem to work - after opening the csv using the import feature, it closes the prompt and just displays the previously focussed password settings page like nothing happened.

I'm not very comfortable with having all these clear text passwords sit on my computer unencrypted so I can enter them when needed, I would much rather have the whole thing sync in an easier (and potentially safer) way.

What would work is to enable Google Sync on all of these profiles, I however don't trust Google with everything and many of the profiles don't have a Google account associated with them.

How can I put a carbon copy of the Chrome data as well as all the cookies (or the passwords, I wouldn't mind logging in manually as long as the passwords auto fill for each profile on each page) on the new device?

Additionally I may add that when entering the settings on the new Mac, I get a "Some settings were reset" prompt that looks like https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/32534/google-chrome-settings-from-user-template-some-settings-were-reset - I don't mind the prompt tho since it's only a backup device, I'm more concerned about the login.

Solution

Since private data encrypted in Chromium browsers you have to copy "Chrome Safe Storage"password in macOS login keychain to new Mac as well.

Comments

[MC10]

You may have already checked this, but is the #PasswordImport flag enabled in Chrome? chrome://flags/#PasswordImport

[user2161301]

Thank you very much for the comment - yes I have set it to enabled, I think before that the import option was not even showing in the UI at all

[cfx]

Did you ever work this out?

[Community]

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