AchBlewy
June 18th, 2011, 08:50 PM
I recently upgraded to 11.04 using the Upgrade Manager over the network. The upgrade seemed to go fine, I think there was some minor hardware complaints but everything seemed fine except that all the data in my home directory was apparently gone. I have no idea if this is important, but during the upgrade dialog I was asked if I wanted to get the encryption pass-phrase and clicked no, but opened a terminal window and got it anyway. After the upgrade I noticed that there exists a .Private folder with encrypted sub-folders/files. Is it possible that my data is hiding here? I fiddled around a bit following some directions about how to manually decrypt those directories but without apparent success. My question remains, is it possible my data is hiding encrypted in the .Private directory? If so what is the correct procedure to get it back into my home directory?
Then I shut down and restarted the system using a 10.10 CD. Mounted the interesting partition and peaked into my home directory. The data is all there, unencrypted. That is nice. I went ahead and tarred up the interesting parts and backed it up to a memory stick.
There are still many possibilities about what is going on here, and I still don't know what to do to get my system running under 11.04 with my data where it should be. I will enumerate a few possible explanations:
Possibility (1): My home directory is normally encrypted (the data is encrypted on a cold disk), but 11.04 does not know (and I don't know) how to unencrypt it, however, 10.10 unencrypts the thing without me having to do anything (somehow this does not seem likely).
Possibility (2): The data is unencrypted on the cold disk, but 11.04 goes ahead and encrypts the thing (a) on boot up or (b) on log in and places it in the .Private directory.
Possibility (3): 11.04 does not know where my real home directory is and recreates an empty new one with a standard .Private directory filled with who knows what.
I think I can easily check Possibility 2b. Help explanations please!
Then I shut down and restarted the system using a 10.10 CD. Mounted the interesting partition and peaked into my home directory. The data is all there, unencrypted. That is nice. I went ahead and tarred up the interesting parts and backed it up to a memory stick.
There are still many possibilities about what is going on here, and I still don't know what to do to get my system running under 11.04 with my data where it should be. I will enumerate a few possible explanations:
Possibility (1): My home directory is normally encrypted (the data is encrypted on a cold disk), but 11.04 does not know (and I don't know) how to unencrypt it, however, 10.10 unencrypts the thing without me having to do anything (somehow this does not seem likely).
Possibility (2): The data is unencrypted on the cold disk, but 11.04 goes ahead and encrypts the thing (a) on boot up or (b) on log in and places it in the .Private directory.
Possibility (3): 11.04 does not know where my real home directory is and recreates an empty new one with a standard .Private directory filled with who knows what.
I think I can easily check Possibility 2b. Help explanations please!