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drtebi

Member

Registered: 2013-02-09

Posts: 148

How to rescue ecryptfs Private encrypted folder? [SOLVED, sort of]

Hello,

My laptop recently became completely unusable. I was however able to remove the SSD drive and use it with an USB enclosure on my desktop.

On the laptop I used ecrypt to encrypt a data directory ("Private") with the Ubuntu Tools as described here.

My question now is, how can I mount that directory on my desktop computer?

I tried to look for what might be the encrypted directory and found ".Private" with a bunch of encrypted files. But mounting it with ecrypt-simple did not work:

$ ecryptfs-simple /run/media/drtebi/a6ab39f6-ba86-43f5-8cca-952ef44b8ee6/home/drtebi/.Private ~/tmp/PolloxPrivateDecrypted/
Mounting /run/media/drtebi/a6ab39f6-ba86-43f5-8cca-952ef44b8ee6/home/drtebi/.Private on /home/drtebi/tmp/PolloxPrivateDecrypted
error: failed to get eCryptfs version
No such file or directory

... so I guess it wasn't as simple as I thought

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Last edited by drtebi (2022-10-05 01:44:01)

drtebi

Member

Registered: 2013-02-09

Posts: 148

Re: How to rescue ecryptfs Private encrypted folder? [SOLVED, sort of]

Small update:
I didn't have kernel module loaded, so the command runs now without error... however...:

ecrypt now simply wants to encrypt this directory instead of decrypting and mounting it? What am I missing?

drtebi

Member

Registered: 2013-02-09

Posts: 148

Re: How to rescue ecryptfs Private encrypted folder? [SOLVED, sort of]

Well, I did go another route: I booted from the drive. This wasn't working at first because of GRUB complaining that the USB drive didn't exist... but when using one of the fallback options from the menu, it worked.

Thus I could mount the "Private" directory, copy the files over to another USB drive, done.

It would still be interesting to know whether there is a way to recover such a "Private" directory from another disk.